Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature
Veronika Steidlová
Humour in Czech Translations of Three Men in a Boat Master‘s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek
2010
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
…………………………………………….. Author‘s signature
Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor Ing. Mgr. Jiří Rambousek for his encouragement and guidance.
Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 1
2
3
4
5
6
General Information ............................................................................................... 3 1.1
Jerome Klapka Jerome‘s Biography .................................................................. 3
1.2
The Novel Three Men in a Boat ......................................................................... 4
1.3
The Czech Translators........................................................................................ 7
1.4
Humour and Its Devices ..................................................................................... 8
Irony........................................................................................................................ 11 2.1
Irony in Three Men in a Boat ........................................................................... 11
2.2
Translation of Irony.......................................................................................... 17
Metaphor ................................................................................................................ 27 3.1
Metaphor in Three Men in a Boat .................................................................... 27
3.2
Translation of Metaphor ................................................................................... 31
Register ................................................................................................................... 41 4.1
Register in Three Men in a Boat ...................................................................... 41
4.2
Translation of Register ..................................................................................... 46
Pragmatics, Wordplay, Ambiguity ...................................................................... 55 5.1
Pragmatics, Wordplay and Ambiguity in Three Men in a Boat ....................... 55
5.2
Translation of Pragmatics-based Devices, Wordplay and Ambiguity ............. 60
Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 71
Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 75 Résumé ........................................................................................................................... 78 Resumé ........................................................................................................................... 79
Introduction The present thesis is devoted to the study of humour devices in Jerome Klapka Jerome‘s humorous novel Three Men in a Boat, first published in 1889, and their Czech renderings by Vladimír Henzl, J. Z. Novák and Milan Ţáček. The popularity of the novel in the Czech literary world is substantiated by the high number of translations and republications. In 1902 it was translated by Theodor and Emil Háchas for the first time. Four other translations followed: by Ladislav Vojtig (Vojtík) in 1922 (republished in 1929, 1948 and 1949), Vladimír Henzl in 1957 (republished in 1966), J. Z. Novák in 1972 (republished in 1975 and 1998) and Milan Ţáček in 2002. The reasons for my choosing the last three translations were the better access to them as well as the fact that the Czech expressions and linguistic features of the more recent translations are certainly closer to and more readable for the present-day readership than those from the beginning of the twentieth century. The work is divided into five chapters, the first one providing a brief biography of Jerome Klapka Jerome, information on the reception of the novel in the English and Czech literary milieus and some details on the Czech translators. One of its subchapters also presents the word ‗humour‘ and what it means, describes the traits of humour of the Victorian era, and lists humour devices following Alison Ross‘s (1998) division. Chapter two attempts to define the principal humour device in Three Men in a Boat – irony. It focuses on types of irony and the techniques used to establish it, illustrating the study with examples from the novel. Chapter three discusses metaphorical language (including metaphors, similes and personification) and its contribution to the humorous tone of the novel. It also deals with idioms which Peter Newmark (1988) classifies as stock metaphors. In chapter four the study concentrates on register as a humour device, 1
especially on the inappropriate usage of formal register and juxtaposition of different registers. Finally, chapter five concerns the pragmatics-based device of breaking the cooperative principle, which leads to misunderstanding or misinterpretation, and the phenomenon of ambiguity and a closely related device of wordplay. The four chapters on humour expedients also include the study and comparison of the Czech renderings as well as discussions on how difficult the task of translating humour is, what the main problems of translating the individual devices are and what translation procedures can be employed. In conclusion the findings pertaining to the translation habits of the individual translators are summarised and compared. Even though Jerome Klapka Jerome‘s novel Three Men in a Boat was and still is popular in many countries, very little has been written about his style and humour, let alone the translations of his works. The only academic study of his humour I came across was Markéta Zemanová‘s diploma thesis ―The Literary Study of Humour in the Novel Three Men in a Boat‖ (2000) which, however, studies solely Jerome‘s humour devices but not their translations. Yet it served as a ‗stepping stone‘ to my thesis and as a basis for my study of humour devices translation.
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1 General Information 1.1
Jerome Klapka Jerome’s Biography
Jerome Klapka Jerome, best known as the author of a comic masterpiece Three Men in a Boat, was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, on 2 May 1859 into a highly-religious family. His father, Jerome Clapp Jerome, worked as a non-conformist preacher and was interested in the local coal and iron industries. One of his coal-mining ventures proved to be a disaster and brought the family to financial ruin. He was forced to move the family to Stourbridge and subsequently to Poplar in the East End of London where Jerome spent his childhood in relative poverty. At the age of fourteen Jerome left school to join various professions – a clerk on the London and North Western Railway, an actor touring the country with a stage company, a journalist, a schoolmaster and a solicitor‘s clerk. In his spare time he was writing short stories, essays and satires which would be rejected for a long time. Then, Jerome had the idea of writing about his experiences as an actor which resulted in his work On the Stage – and Off, a volume of humorous sketches published in 1885. This was followed by a collection of humorous essays The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886). In 1888 Jerome married Georgina Elizabeth Henrietta Stanley Marris (called Ettie) and acquired a daughter – Elsie – by this marriage. His own daughter Rowena was born in 1898. After the newly-weds‘ honeymoon, spent on the Thames, Jerome began writing Three Men in a Boat. The book was published in 1889 and made him famous and rich and enabled him to make the acquaintance of great writers including H. G. Wells, Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. From then on numerous literary works came to being, among them the novels The Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891), Three Men on 3
the Bummel (1900, the sequel to the Boat), Paul Kelver (1902), a popular morality play The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908), and many more. He also excelled as the editor (of a monthly magazine The Idler and a weekly To-Day) and as the prolific columnist. Jerome travelled a lot to Russia, America and especially Germany where he gave various lectures. He was fond of Germany, which prompted him to move his family to Dresden in 1900 where they stayed for two years. When the First World War broke out, he enlisted in the French army as a front line ambulance driver. He returned home disillusioned and a broken man. Towards the end of his life he finished his memoirs My Life and Times (1926) which, though short on domestic details and lacking chronological order, is one of Jerome‘s most entertaining books. On the way back from a motoring tour in Devon with his wife Ettie, Jerome suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died two weeks later (14 June 1927) in Northampton General Hospital. He and Ettie, who outlived him by eleven years, were buried in the Ewelme churchyard, Oxfordshire, close to their beloved River Thames (Nicholas 7 – 10).
1.2 The Novel Three Men in a Boat Jerome‘s novel Three Men in a Boat could be characterised as a comic pastoral celebrating simple life devoid of luxury, false friends and high society vices. Apart from comic events and situations the three characters experience, it contains lyrical descriptions of nature and philosophical reflections comparing the trip up and down the Thames to the voyage up and down the river of Life. In some parts of the novel social
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criticism comes to the fore, frowning upon greed and excessive accumulation of possession (Stříbrný 564). Jerome Klapka Jerome claimed that all the events recorded in his novel Three Men in a Boat really happened, they were only a little embellished. Even the characters appearing in the novel were based on real people – Jerome‘s friends with whom he made a considerable number of rows up and down the Thames and a cycling trip across Europe. George Wingrave (George in the novel) worked as a bank clerk and he shared a room with Jerome for some time. Carl Hentschel (Harris) was born in Poland and came to England with his parents at the age of five. He set up his own photography business and co-founded The Playgoer‘s Club, on which occasion he met Jerome. Jerome‘s excellent essays The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) had been serialised in the monthly magazine Home Chimes, edited by F. W. Robinson. And it was Robinson himself who accepted Jerome‘s next project called The Story of the Thames. At first the book was not intended to be funny; it should have described the river‘s scenery and historical events that had taken place near the Thames, and it should have been interspersed with occasional humorous passages. However, it came quite the other way round – it became a humorous novel with occasional passages dealing with the river‘s scenery and history. Robinson readily removed some of those ‗serious‘ passages and insisted that Jerome made up a better title. Three Men in a Boat seemed to be the most appropriate one. The book was published in 1889 by J. W. Arrowsmith and it quickly made Jerome‘s name, the copies being big sellers. It was extremely successful not only in Britain, but also in the USA, Germany and Russia, and translated into many languages, including Japanese, Hebrew, Irish and Portuguese. The novel has been filmed three
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times (1920, 1933, 1956), adapted into a musical by Hubert Gregg, made into a stage play, read aloud on radio and even performed in a one-man show. The style of the novel Three Men in a Boat was completely new and fresh. Unlike other Victorian writers – such as Conan Doyle, R. L. Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling – whose stories captured fantastical adventures and fearless heroes, Jerome‘s novel portrayed three ordinary pipe-smoking men having fun on an ordinary boating trip. He used everyday language and mocked the matters of everyday life. Of course, fervent critics (especially from The Saturday Review and Puch) soon took Jerome to task. He was criticised for the new kind of humour and accused of ‗vulgarity‘, using colloquial clerk‘s English. The extraordinary commercial success, however, suggested that the general readership was not influenced by this sharp criticism and that people wanted to take a rest from literary grandiloquence and solemnity and to spend their spare time with a book that made them laugh (Nicholas 57 – 61). Despite the general interest in Jerome‘s works, his writings are not very highly thought of in the official English literary history. The Czech readership, however, received the novel enthusiastically, which was probably due to the similarity between Jerome‘s humour and the humour of the famous Czech writers such as Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Čapek and Karel Poláček (Stříbrný 564). The popularity of the novel in the Czech literary milieu is also indicated by the fact that it has been translated five times and repeatedly republished.
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1.3
The Czech Translators
Vladimír Henzl (1910 – 1978; pen-names Jan Kolovrat, Vladimír Černý) Vladimír Henzl graduated in law and worked as a clerk at the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs and during the Second World War at consulates in England and the United States. He was the author of juvenile adventure literature (Zátoka pirátů; Přiznejte se, kapitáne) and translated from English (especially works by James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson), Italian and Serbo-Croatian (Obec překladatelů).
Jiří Zdeněk Novák (1912 – 2001) Even though J. Z. Novák graduated from the Faculty of Law in Prague, he devoted his professional life to cultural activities. He worked as an editor in Melantrich publishing company, then as a script editor in Barrandov film studios and since 1951 he had been engaged in writing, scriptwriting and translating. Novák focused mainly on drama translation from English (Oscar Wilde) and French (Molière) but he also translated several detective stories (W. Inge, A. Christie, P. G. Wodehouse) and many works of other genres (Obec překladatelů).
Milan Ţáček (1974) Milan Ţáček graduated in English and Spanish philology at the Palacký University in Olomouc and since 2000 has been working as a freelance translator. He specialises in translation of English fiction (Jerome Klapka Jerome, P. G. Wodehouse) and in fantasy and horror literature (George MacDonald, H. P. Lovecraft, China Miéville, Ian R. MacLeod etc.). He also translated two volumes of poetry by Charles Bukowski and several children‘s books, among them Kate DiCamillo‘s The Tale of 7
Despereaux (Příběh o Zoufálkovi) which Albatros publishing company awarded as the best translation in 2008 (Email to the author).
1.4
Humour and Its Devices
As this thesis focuses on the study of translation of humour, I would like to provide a brief explanation of the term ‗humour‘ and to mention some of its expedients. The meaning of the word ‗humour‘ was originally far from what it means today. The term derived from Latin humor, meaning ‗moisture‘ or ‗body fluid‘, and in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance period it was used to denote the four humours of the body – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile (proposed by Hippocrates) – which determined a person‘s mental disposition, character and temperament. The theory of humours survives up to this day in such expressions as ‗ill-humoured‘, ‗goodhumoured‘, ‗yellow with jealousy‘, etc. In the sixteenth century the theory of humours is employed in drama for the first time when Ben Jonson names the characters in his comedy Every Man in His Humour (1598) in terms of their prevailing bodily fluids (Cuddon 313 – 4). It is not until the seventeenth century that ‗humour‘ is used to refer to the comic and ridiculous. In the eighteen century the word gradually got in all the European languages, differentiating the positive, kind and comforting comicality from caricature and satire (Vlašín 141). The humour of the Victorian era, in which Jerome Klapka Jerome created his literary works, can be described as domesticated, which means that it ―settles down to chuckling over the mores of an approved social order or the harmless oddities of stock figures and types: policemen, clergymen, urchins, schoolchildren, tramps, drunks, professors, artists, eccentrics‖ (McArthur 488). This is exactly what Jerome does in his
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Three Men in a Boat. He comments on social issues, such as poverty, superabundance of wealth, criminality; kindly mocks various types of characters, among them villagers, fishermen, railway employees, boasters, oversensitive ladies; and last but not least makes fun of the three main characters themselves. The humour of this kind can be also found in the nineteenth-century magazine Punch, ―a representative of the affluent middle class smirking indulgently at its own foibles, at its own establishment and its servants, at the oddities of the poor, and at the strange ways of foreigners‖ (McArthur 488). What is important for the creation and reception of humour in general is the social context – humour outdates very quickly and is often dependent on specific cultures and attitudes. Humour is also a matter of personal taste as it is likely that two people will perceive a joke very differently (Ross 2 – 4). While the study of creation and perception of humour in social terms would be very complex and would differ from society to society, the study of language features that contribute to humour is far less demanding as the features are almost the same across languages and are relatively easy to detect. Humour can be elicited by structural ambiguity on phonological (homophones), morphological (compound words), lexical (polysemy) and syntactical (ambiguous sentence structures) level; or by incongruity in language. Incongruity theory ―focuses on the element of surprise. It states that humour is created out of a conflict between what is expected and what actually occurs in the joke‖ (Ross 7). Incongruity can appear in the fields of semantics (metaphors, contradictions, verbal irony), pragmatics (breaking of cooperative principle, misunderstanding), discourse (breaking the expectations) and register (using inappropriate register) (Ross 7 – 51). In Three Men in a Boat the most significant of these devices of humour are those of irony, metaphors
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and similes, register, and lexical and syntactical ambiguity. And these particular devices and their translations into Czech are studied in the present thesis.
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2 Irony 2.1 Irony in Three Men in a Boat Irony plays a vital, if not leading, role in Jerome‘s Three Men in a Boat and represents an element that contributes most to the overall humorous tone of the novel. Jerome employs irony mainly to observe and criticise human weaknesses, such as laziness, lying or drinking, to express his or his companions‘ attitudes (e.g. to work or food) and to complain about the ―natural cussedness of things in general‖ (Jerome 100). This linguistic device is very difficult to define and even more difficult to recognise and evaluate. Martin Montgomery presents irony as the non-literal use of language ―in which we say one thing but mean another‖ and which ―is also often thought of as a type of tone, a particular way of speaking or writing‖ (138). Marta Mateo, on the other hand, thinks that this definition (adopted by most critics) is not sufficient and does not cover the complex techniques that are used to create irony. At the same time she admits that there is no universal set of linguistic features that could help identify irony and proposes that irony depends on context ―since it springs from the relationships of a word, expression or action with the whole text or situation‖ (172). Irony is a matter of interpretation and can be easily misunderstood as it works at two levels: a lower level – the situation as it is deceptively presented by the ironist – and an upper level – the situation as it appears to the observer or the ironist. There must be the element of opposition (contradiction, incongruity) between the two levels and they both must be presented as true. Another element that contributes to irony is the element of ‗innocence‘ which refers to the victim‘s unawareness of the upper level or the ironist‘s pretending not to be aware of it. Irony is not employed to deceive the reader/hearer but to be recognized. The reader/hearer is supposed to realise that a 11
proposition has a different – real – meaning from what is being proposed (Mateo 172). The ability to spot irony depends mostly on the awareness of how the language is used, on values shared by the ironist and the victim and on general world knowledge. Montgomery (138 – 9) classifies irony into two main types: verbal (corresponds with Mateo‘s intentional irony) and situational (Mateo‘s unintentional irony). Verbal irony is being communicated and occurs when a combination of words and its literal meaning seem to be somehow odd or wrong. In order to understand the irony one has to – with the help of context and the world knowledge – find another (real) meaning. Situational irony exists already in the situation. It is created by an author, but the characters involved are not aware of it. Jerome Klapka Jerome uses both verbal and situational irony in his novel. Several examples of verbal irony appear already in the subheadings that introduce each chapter. As Markéta Zemanová correctly points out in her diploma thesis, the irony can be traced back only after reading the whole chapters (22). Thus we can find out that bathing in rough sea, in windy weather is referred to as ―Delights of early morning bathing‖ (Jerome 23). An accident in which J., after decrying his decision to have a bath in the cold water, unwillingly falls in the river is described as ―Heroism and determination on the part of J.‖ (Jerome 100), and the three friend‘s conversation concerning various diseases presented as ―The cheery chat goes round‖ (Jerome 181). In all these examples the element of opposition or contradiction is clearly apparent – the author renders unpleasant feelings as delights, cowardice as heroism and chatting about diseases as a pleasant chat. Verbal irony can be also found in large numbers in the narration itself. In the following example, in which Jerome talks about his fellow student‘s rather odd health, one can see how the author works with contradiction (underlined):
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He would take bronchitis in the dog-days, and have hay-fever at Christmas. After a six-weeks‘ period of drought, he would be stricken down with rheumatic fever; and he would go out in a November fog and come home with a sunstroke. (Jerome 53)
It is not common to catch bronchitis in summer time or hay-fever in winter time and it is highly improbable that one can suffer rheumatic fever when the weather is dry and sunstroke when it is foggy. Here is another extract in which verbal irony can be traced. The character of J. describes his encounter with the owner of the material he made his raft from without permission:
His anxiety to meet you, however, is proof against all your coolness, and the energetic manner in which he dodges up and down the pond so as to be on the spot to greet you when you land is really quite flattering. (Jerome 152)
Here the underlined words are used inappropriately and are in opposition to the real situation that is most likely in progress – the owner is very angry (―his anxiety to meet you‖) which means that he probably won‘t greet the thief and the encounter won‘t be flattering in any way. Montgomery mentions two main techniques that are used to create irony: overemphasis and internal inconsistency (140). When an author employs overemphatic language, he uses words that have ―the effect of overemphasizing what is being said, and so drawing attention to it. What makes them excessive is that their presence needs to be explained; we can account for their presence as a clue to the reader that what they are saying is not plausible (hence it needs excessive emphasis)‖ (140). I selected two 13
examples from the novel in which overemphatic language (underlined) is apparently used to express the narrator‘s ironic attitude:
It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me; the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart. You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me; my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon. And I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn‘t a finger-mark on it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do. (Jerome 148 – 9)
It was my misfortune once to go for a water picnic with two ladies of this kind. We did have a lively time! (Jerome 62)
When a statement does not make sense or the style of a narration is not consistent (e. g. unexpected changes in register), it is a case of internal inconsistency which is the second type of mechanism for creating irony (Montgomery 140). Jerome frequently switches suddenly from one register to another or from commonplace to poetic, refined language as in this example:
And the red sunset threw a mystic light upon the waters, and tinged with fire the towering woods, and made a golden glory of the piled-up clouds. It was an hour of deep enchantment, of ecstatic hope and longing. The little sail stood out against the purple sky, the gloaming lay around us, wrapping the world in rainbow shadows; and, behind us, crept the night. We seemed like knights of
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some old legend, sailing across some mystic lake into the unknown realm of twilight, unto the great land of the sunset. We did not go into the realm of twilight; we went slap into that punt, where those three old men were fishing. (Jerome 121 – 2)
In the first part of the extract, Jerome employs poetic repertoire and language including several poetic devices – vivid imagery (e. g. ‗mystic light‘, ‗deep enchantment‘, ‗ecstatic hope‘, ‗rainbow shadows‘), a simile (‗like knights of some old legend‘) and personification (‗the gloaming . . . wrapping the world‘, ‗crept the night‘). In the following paragraph, the author all of a sudden switches to ordinary language (underlined), describing the collision with the boat. Thus, he produces a comic and ironic effect related to the characters‘ absentmindedness. Muecke (in Mateo 173) distinguishes three types of irony that are characteristic of novels: impersonal irony, in which the ironist as a person is in the background and the irony lies solely in his words; self-disparaging irony, in which the ironist presents his qualities, such as ignorance or naivety; and ingénu irony, in which the ironist uses a character (an ingénu) for his irony. There are several techniques for creating impersonal irony. In Jerome‘s novel the most frequent is that of innuendo, i.e. an indirect remark about something or somebody:
There is an iron ―scold‘s bridle‖ in Walton Church. They used these things in ancient days for curbing women‘s tongues. They have given up the attempt now. I suppose iron was getting scarce, and nothing else would be strong enough. (Jerome 78)
He said it, The Pride of the Thames, had been in use, just as it now stood (or rather as it now hung together), for the last forty years . . . (Jerome 183) 15
The first example alludes to some women‘s cantankerousness and garrulousness, the second one to the miserable state of a boat called The Pride of the Thames. Other techniques include overstatement (dealt with above as overemphasis) and understatement as in this extract:
And at that precise moment the man did it, and the boat rushed up the bank with a noise like the ripping up of forty thousand linen sheets. Two men, a hamper, and three oars immediately left the boat on the larboard side, and reclined on the bank, and one and a half moments afterwards, two other men disembarked from the starboard, and sat down among boat-hooks and sails and carpet-bags and bottles. The last man went on twenty yards further, and then got out on his head. (Jerome 85)
The author here describes an accident when a boat hits the river bank and the passengers fall out of the boat in different directions. He makes use of words (underlined) that do not match the situation and thus disparages it. Pretended innocence or ignorance also ranks among the impersonal irony techniques that occur frequently in Jerome‘s novel. The following example again concerns J.‘s encounter with the proprietor of the material which J. made his raft from. The irony here is based on the double meaning of the expression ‗to teach somebody to do something‘. The character pretends not to recognise the threat and interprets it falsely as a mere offer made by the proprietor to teach him something new:
He says he‘ll teach you to take his boards and make a raft of them; but, seeing that you know how to do this pretty well already, the offer, though doubtless kindly meant, seems a superfluous one on his part, and you are reluctant to put him to any trouble by accepting it. (Jerome 152) 16
The above example could also be regarded as self-disparaging irony as the author of the irony himself presents his seeming innocence. Another instance of this type of irony appears in chapter eight and refers to J.‘s ignorance of German language:
I don‘t understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since. (Jerome 75)
The last type of irony – ingénu irony – occurs quite frequently in the novel as well. The author often makes the characters of Harris and George the targets of his irony as in the instance below, in which George‘s job is made fun of:
Harris and I would go down in the morning, and take the boat up to Chertsey, and George, who would not be able to get away from the City till the afternoon (George goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day; except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two), would meet us there. (Jerome 17)
Until now I have been focusing on verbal irony. Jerome‘s work abounds with situational irony as well, in fact, I dare say it makes it one of the masterpieces of humoristic literature. However, as situational irony is not much workable from the point of view of translation, I won‘t deal with it in detail.
2.2
Translation of Irony
Translation of humour is often compared to translation of poetry as ―the formal aspects are an integral part of both types of texts. The link is also established on the basis of the 17
difficulty of both tasks‖ (Mateo 174). The difficulty of translating humour depends on what means it is based on. If humour lies in linguistic aspects such as puns, it is highly probable that it will be difficult to translate or even untranslatable. On the other hand, humour based on irony or on reversal of situation or tone will be easier to deal with (Mateo 174). As stated above, the identification of irony depends mostly on context and background knowledge. However, when an author works with satire and allusion to create irony, the socio-cultural aspect becomes relevant as well. Thus, the translation of irony is heavily influenced by the proximity of cultures – the more distant the culture is, the more difficult the understanding of humour and irony will be (Mateo 174). In my opinion, the Czech and English cultures and their perception of irony are close enough to allow the translator to render all the cases of irony in Jerome‘s Three Men in a Boat without any substantial changes. Moreover, Jerome uses similar mechanisms for creating irony (contradiction, overstatement, pretended innocence etc.) as those that are generally employed in world literature, as well as similar topics to be ironic about (laziness, weather, work, Murphy‘s laws and so on), therefore the understanding and translation of irony in this case are not very complicated. The following example of irony is based mainly on overemphasis, contradiction (lies vs. veracity) and on the surprise at the logic of the statement claiming that what makes a good fisherman is not mere lying, but well-thought-out and meticulous saying of untruths:
Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake. Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general 18
air of scrupulous — almost of pedantic — veracity, that the experienced angler is seen. (Jerome 168)
The translations are as follows:
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
Jsou lidé, kteří mají dojem,
Někteří lidé mají dojem, ţe
Někteří lidé ţijí v
ţe člověk, aby byl dobrým
k tomu, aby byl z někoho
přesvědčení, ţe vše, čeho
rybářem, potřebuje jen
dobrý rybář, úplně stačí
má dobrý rybář zapotřebí,
schopnost snadno a bez
schopnost plynně a bez
je schopnost plynně lhát a
uzardění lhát. To je však
uzardění lhát; ale to je
zachovávat si přitom
omyl. Obyčejný holý
omyl. Holý výmysl sám o
kamennou tvář; to je ale
nesmysl není k ničemu. To
sobě není k ničemu; na ten
omyl. Pouhopouhé pusté
dovede kaţdý začátečník.
se vzmůţe i začátečník. Ale
výmysly k ničemu nejsou;
Zkušený rybář se pozná
ţe ho propracuje do
zvládne je i ten
podle zevrubných
nejmenších podrobností, ţe
nejnevinnější začátečník.
podrobností a zkrášlujících
ho vyšperkuje prvky
Zkušenost rybáře je patrná
tahů provedených štětcem
pravděpodobnosti, ţe mu
v podruţných detailech, v
pravděpodobnosti. Kromě
dodá zdání úzkostlivé — aţ
líčeních, jimiţ přikrašluje
toho musí působit dojmem
pedantské — věrohodnosti,
pravděpodobné vyznění, v
úzkostlivé — téměř
teprve podle toho se pozná
pečlivosti - ba skoro aţ
pedantické —
rybář zkušený. (203)
úzkostlivosti -, s níţ lpí na
pravdomluvnosti. (187)
hodnověrnosti. (176)
To create overemphasis, Jerome uses phrases including descriptive adjectives, such as ‗circumstantial
detail‘,
‗the
embellishing
touches
of
probability‘
and
‗scrupulous/pedantic veracity‘ which are easily translatable into Czech (underlined) and for which there are plenty of different solutions. The translatability is moreover made easier by generally shared attitude to lying as something unacceptable.
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Another aspect that plays a role in translating humour is that of transporting ―sense‖ and ―form‖ which are both very important when dealing with humour. Keeping the sense is more or less easy but preserving the form can cause problems as ―irony and humour may simply spring from an alliteration in the usual syntactic order of a sentence, from the choice of an unusual collocation or, indeed, from the very use of a certain word‖ (Mateo 174). These formal features are very difficult to transfer to the target text assuming that the translator wants to preserve the original sense as well. As the irony in Three Men in a Boat is created mainly by the devices of contradiction, opposition, overemphasis and pretended innocence/ignorance, there are not many cases of irony in which form plays a crucial role. However, some examples can be found. In the following extract, which describes the characters being chased by the smell of paraffin oil, the chief device to create irony is the repetition of the expression ‗oily wind‘ and the coordinating conjunction ‗and‘:
Sometimes a westerly oily wind blew, and at other times an easterly oily wind, and sometimes it blew a northerly oily wind, and maybe a southerly oily wind . . . (Jerome 31)
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
Někdy vanul západní
Někdy foukal západní
Občas dul západní
parafinový vítr, jindy zas
petrolejový vítr, jindy
petrolejový vítr, jindy to
východní parafinový vítr,
východní petrolejový vítr,
byl východní petrolejový
chvílemi foukal severní
někdy severní petrolejový
vítr, někdy vál zase
parafinový vítr nebo taky
vítr a snad i jiţní
petrolejový vítr ze severu,
jiţní parafinový vítr. (36)
petrolejový vítr . . . (38)
moţná jsme pocítili i petrolejový vítr od jihu. (36)
20
Henzl and Novák opt to preserve the repetition of the ‗-ly oily wind‘ pattern as ‗-ní parafinový vítr‘ and ‗-ní petrolejový vítr‘, respectively. Ţáček, on the other hand, uses this pattern only twice and then continues with ‗petrolejový vítr ze severu‘ and ‗petrolejový vítr od jihu‘, which sounds natural and smooth in Czech but is inconsistent with the original‘s pattern which is probably supposed to create irony and emphasise the fact that the oily smell is everywhere. All the three translators avoid the repetition of the conjunction ‗and‘. In English this repetition contributes to the ironic tone of the utterance, in Czech, on the contrary, it would sound clumsy and thus destroy the ironic element there. Another instance of irony, in which transporting the form is essential, concerns George‘s playing the banjo accompanied by Montmorency‘s howling. George‘s question is ironically answered by Harris‘s question of the same form, only the verbs ‗to howl‘ and ‗to play‘ are swapped:
―What‘s he want to howl like that for when I‘m playing?‖ George would exclaim indignantly, while taking aim at him with a boot. ―What do you want to play like that for when he is howling?‖ Harris would retort, catching the boot. (Jerome 140 – 1)
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
„Co potřebuje takhle výt,
„Co ho to posedlo, ţe
„Proč se, kdyţ hraji, dává
kdyţ já hraju?― zvolal Jiří
takhle vyje, kdyţ já
do takového vytí?― ptal se
uraţeně a hodil po
hraju?― křičel rozhořčeně
George rozhořčeně,
Montmorencym botu.
George a házel po něm
zatímco si psa bral na
botou.
mušku zutou botou.
„Co to tebe posedlo, ţe
„A proč chceš vlastně hrát,
„Co ty potřebuješ takhle
21
hrát, kdyţ on vyje?―
takhle hraješ, kdyţ on
kdyţ tak vyje?― opáčil
odpověděl Jiří1 a botu chytil. vyje?― odpovídal Harris a
Harris a botu zachytil.
(157)
(150)
tu botu vţdycky zachytil. (172)
Both Henzl and Novák follow the original pattern and preserve the form of the two questions. Thus, they succeed in retaining the irony of the remark suggesting that George‘s playing is not pleasant to listen to and that Harris prefers the dog‘s howling. Ţáček, on the other hand, does not realise the importance of keeping the form in this example. He does not swap the verbs ‗výt‘ and ‗hrát‘ and does not give the discussed questions the same form in his translation, which causes the effect of irony to be impaired. In the last example of irony, whose form presents an inseparable part of it and thus should be translated into the target language, Jerome overemphasises such a common thing as ‗being full up‘ by using very refined and lofty language:
We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. Reach not after morality and righteousness, my friends; watch vigilantly your stomach, and diet it with care and judgment. Then virtue and contentment will come and reign within your heart, unsought by any effort of your own; and you will be a good citizen, a loving husband, and a tender father – a noble, pious man. (Jerome 94 – 5)
The poetic and philosophical tone of this extract is established by the use of descriptive adjectives (‗sorriest‘, ‗loving‘, ‗noble‘ etc.), adverbs (‗vigilantly‘) and words concerning morality such as ‗righteousness‘ and ‗virtue‘. These features are supplemented with a metaphor (‗slaves of our stomach‘) and personification (‗virtue and contentment will come and reign‘). In my opinion, the three translators are successful in transporting the 1
This is a mistake – it should be Harris.
22
form into the target language as they use appropriate adjectives, preserve the metaphor and personification and their language contains about the same loftiness as the original:
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
Jsme opravdu
Jsme prostě ti nejuboţejší
Jsme opravdoví a
nejuboţejšími otroky svého
otroci svých ţaludků.
prachbídní otroci vlastního
ţaludku. Nesnaţte se,
Nepachtěte se po tom,
břicha. Přátelé, nesápejte se
přátelé, být mravní a
abyste byli mravní a
po mravnosti a
poctiví. Dbejte bedlivě o
poctiví, přátelé moji; jenom spravedlnosti, sledujte
svůj ţaludek a krmte ho
se bedlivě starejte o své
bedlivě svá břicha a krmte
opatrně a moudře. Pak
ţaludky a krmte je opatrně
je pečlivě a uváţlivě. Pak
ctnost a blaţenost zavládne
a uváţlivě. Pak ctnost a
se dostaví i ctnost a
ve vašich srdcích, aniţ by
spokojenost samy vstoupí
spokojenost, jeţ zavládnou
bylo třeba ji namáhavě
do vašich srdcí a budou
ve vašem srdci, aniţ o ně
hledat, a stanete se dobrými
jimi vládnout a vy
budete nějak usilovat.
občany, milujícími
nemusíte vynakládat ţádné
Stanete se dobrým obča-
manţely, něţnými otci a
úsilí, abyste jich dosáhli;
nem, milujícím manţelem a
ušlechtilými, zboţnými
pak budete dobrými
citlivým otcem - důstojným
lidmi. (108)
občany a milujícími man-
a zboţným muţem. (102)
ţely a něţně chápajícími otci — prostě ušlechtilými, zboţnými lidmi. (117)
As Zemanová observes in her thesis, Jerome employs another device to create irony – he uses italics to stress words and their contribution to irony (24). The use of italics occurs, for example, in the sentence concerning Harris‘s singing a comic song:
You have never heard Harris sing a comic song, or you would understand the service I had rendered to mankind. It is one of Harris‘s fixed ideas that he can sing a comic song; the fixed idea, on the contrary, among those of Harris‘s
23
friends who have heard him try, is that he can’t, and never will be able to, and that he ought not to be allowed to try. (Jerome 70)
Even though it is a common practice in Czech to stress a word by means of word order, Henzl, Novák and Ţáček use italics as well:
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
Nikdy jste Harrise neslyšeli
Vy jste nikdy neslyšeli
Ještě jste neslyšeli, jak
zpívat ţertovnou píseň,
Harrise zpívat kuplet, takţe
Harris zpívá komickou
proto nemůţete ocenit
nemůţete pochopit, jak
píseň, jinak byste
sluţbu, kterou jsem
velikou sluţbu jsem tím
pochopili, jakou sluţbu
prokázal lidstvu. Jednou z
prokázal lidstvu. Jednou z
jsem lidstvu tímto svým
Jiřího2 utkvělých myšlenek
Harrisových utkvělých
skutkem prokázal. Harris
je, ţe umí zazpívat
myšlenek totiţ je, ţe umí
ţije s utkvělou představou,
ţertovnou píseň. Naproti
zpívat kuplety, ti Harrisovi
ţe umí zpívat komické
tomu utkvělou myšlenkou
přátelé, kteří uţ zaţili
písně. Harrisovi přátelé na
Harrisových přátel, kteří ho
Harrisovy pokusy v tom
druhé straně ţijí s utkvělou
slyšeli, jak se pokouší
směru, mají naopak
představou, ţe je zpívat
takovou píseň zazpívat, je,
utkvělou myšlenku, ţe to
neumí, nebude umět a ani
ţe to neumí, umět nikdy
Harris neumí, ţe to nikdy
by mu nemělo být
nebude a ţe by se mu
umět nebude a ţe by se mu
umoţněno, aby se o něco
nemělo dovolit, aby se o to
nikdy nemělo dovolit, aby
takového pokoušel. (78)
pokoušel. (81)
to zkoušel. (87 – 8)
The translators place the verb ‗umí‘ at the beginning of the phrase, although it would gain more stress in the final position. However, their solutions of keeping the italics are probably based on their assumptions that words in italics stand out from the text and monopolise the reader‘s attention more than non-italicised words in the final position. In this type of text the solutions are justifiable and can be considered successful.
2
This is a mistake – it should be Harris.
24
In conclusion of this chapter on irony, I would like to comment on the general way the three Czech translators render irony in Three Men in the Boat. I will attempt to demonstrate it on one example, the comments are, however, based on the overall study of irony in the novel. The extract is related to J.‘s judging Harris‘s taste in clothing:
It is a great pity, because he will never be a success as it is, while there are one or two colours in which he might not really look so bad, with his hat on. (Jerome 61)
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
Je to velká škoda, protoţe
A je to pro něj veliká
Je to obrovská škoda, a
takhle se nikdy nebude
škoda, protoţe takhle
třebaţe by se našly jedna či
líbit, a při tom je tu jedna
jakţiv neudělá díru do
dvě barvy, v nichţ by
nebo dvě barvy, v kterých
světa, ačkoli by se našly
vskutku nevypadal zle -
by opravdu nevypadal tak
dvě tři barvy, v kterých by
pakliţe by měl na hlavě
zle, kdyby si nechal na
moţná nevypadal tak
klobouk -, za tohoto stavu
hlavě klobouk. (71)
strašně, kdyby si ovšem
nikdy úspěchu nedosáhne.
narazil klobouk. (76)
(68)
Vladimír Henzl seems to stick to the original and does not play with the language very much. The ironic tone is preserved but it is not so marked as that of Novák‘s and Ţáček‘s translations. J. Z. Novák, on the other hand, tends to enhance Jerome‘s irony by using more expressive and colloquial words and phrases, such as ‗neudělá díru do světa‘ or ‗narazil si klobouk‘ in the above example. Milan Ţáček also tries to enhance the irony by colloquial expressions, although not as much as Novák does, or by somewhat archaic sounding words, such as the conjunction ‗pakliţe‘ in the above table. Even though each of the translators uses different language and has different approach to
25
translating irony, their translations are successful in transporting sense as well as preserving the effect they should have on the readers.
26
3 Metaphor 3.1
Metaphor in Three Men in a Boat
Metaphorical language is an integral part of any literary text and is one of the most admired features in literature. Metaphor represents one of the figures of speech and it ―occurs when a word or phrase in a passage is clearly out of place in the topic being dealt with but nevertheless makes sense because of some similarity between it and what is being talked about‖ (Montgomery 129). To be able to interpret metaphor, the reader has to recognise the similarity between the two concepts and carry it over to the new context. Metaphor can reinforce the reader‘s imagination and conceptions of the world, as well as influence his or her attitude to the topic that is discussed (Montgomery 134). In other words, metaphor is ―a process of referring figuratively and emotively to an object in terms of another‖ (Menacere 568), and serves to stimulate an image, to provoke an interesting comparison or to provide original ways of perceiving the world (Alvarez 480). When studying (or translating) metaphors it is useful to be able to analyse them. In 1936, I. A. Richards proposed and named three aspects of metaphor (96 and 117):
Tenor – the original idea; what is really being said or thought of, Vehicle – the borrowed idea; what the original idea is compared to, Ground – the common characteristics.
Thus, in Jerome‘s metaphor ―Sunlight is the life-blood of Nature‖ (Jerome 184), sunlight is the tenor, life-blood the vehicle, and the shared element (or ground) probably life or energy. 27
Peter Newmark understands metaphors as devices used to ―describe an entity, event or quality more comprehensively and concisely and in a more complex way than is possible by using literal language‖ (Approaches 84) and divides them into five types (84 – 94):
Dead metaphors are fossilized metaphors (e. g. ‗arm of the chair‘); many of them have been imported from other languages (e. g. ‗think‘ from Old English); Cliché metaphors usually consist of stereotyped collocations (‗leave no stone unturned‘); Stock metaphors are standard or common metaphors; they may be one word metaphors (‗a ray of hope‘) or extended metaphors, i.e. idioms (‗cast a shadow over‘) Recent metaphors often include neologisms such as ‗head-hunters‘; Original (creative) metaphors are invented by an author and are often dramatic and shocking in effect (e.g. ‗the sun flung spangles, dancing coins‘).
As this division is quite complex and analysing the metaphors in Three men in a Boat in this way would require a thorough (sometimes even etymological) study, I will confine my focus to the most frequent types of metaphor in the novel – the stock metaphors, especially idioms, and original metaphors. These types of metaphor are also worth of studying from the translation point of view – it is interesting to observe what Czech equivalents of the English idioms are used and how the translators maintain the creativity of the original metaphors.
28
One of the subtypes of metaphor that is widely employed in Jerome‘s book is that of simile. Like metaphor, simile also draws attention to the similarity between two things or phenomena but whereas in metaphor the comparison is implied, in simile the comparison is explicitly expressed with the help of words such as ‗like‘ or ‗as‘ (Montgomery 129). Jerome makes use of similes in his humorous or ironic remarks about somebody or something, as in
The man they had got now was a jolly, light-hearted, thick-headed sort of chap with about as much sensitiveness in him as there might be in a Newfoundland puppy (Jerome 63);
as well as in his poetic parts of the novel:
It was a glorious morning, late spring or early summer, as you care to take it, when the dainty sheen of grass and leaf is blushing to a deeper green; and the year seems like a fair young maid, trembling with strange, wakening pulses on the brink of womanhood. (Jerome 49)
Personification (anthropomorphic metaphor), another category of metaphor, is abundant in Three Men in a Boat as well. Personification appears when human traits (qualities, feelings etc.) are attributed to non-living things, animals, phenomena, and so on. Jerome again applies personification both in the humorous situations and in the poetic descriptions. In the former he personifies food, toothbrushes, tow-lines, boats, tea-kettles, towns and the like, to make fun of the things and especially of people who are affected by the things‘ mean ‗behaviour‘:
29
That is the only way to get a kettle to boil up the river. If it sees that you are waiting for it and are anxious, it will never even sing. . . . You get near the kettle, so that it can overhear you, and then you shout out . . . (Jerome 93)
In the latter Jerome uses personification as a poetic device to make the poetic descriptions more vivid and imagination-provoking:
. . . with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the greygreen beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o‘er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, . . . (Jerome 184)
Even though metaphor is a feature predominantly present in and typical of poetry, it occurs very frequently in any literary text and can contribute to its humorous tone. It is the non-literal meaning or the comparison included in metaphor that, when used inappropriately or awkwardly, creates incongruity and thus humorous effect (Ross 35):
We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. (Jerome 94)
In this example, the comparison of humans to slaves who have to constantly serve their stomachs produces a comic effect, as the statement is obviously exaggerated and contains poor justification for people‘s indulgence in eating.
30
3.2
Translation of Metaphor
The problem of translation of metaphor has not been sufficiently researched yet and individual translators and literary critics hold different attitudes to approaching it. Some think that metaphor should be rendered literally, some claim that this would result in a meaningless expression in the target text (Menacere 568). Culturally based metaphors, i.e. metaphors in which the two images compared are perceived differently by the source and target cultures, will be naturally more difficult to translate than those in which the images have the same cognitive content in both cultures. This fact is also related to the use of symbols. Some symbols have universal applications and are perceived equally in the cultures and thus are easily translatable. On the other hand, symbols that convey different meanings in different cultures require complete transformation of metaphor otherwise the translation would be senseless (Menacere 569 – 70). Since English and Czech cultures are, in terms of understanding symbols and perceiving images, relatively close, the translation of metaphors in Jerome‘s Three Men in a Boat did not involve any substantial changes. For example, as the concept of ‗sword‘ is understood as a symbol of power (or power gained by violence) both in English and Czech, the Czech translators do not have to transform the metaphor in any way:
. . . for the sword is judge and jury, plaintiff and executioner, in these tempestuous times . . . (Jerome 107)
Henzl . . . neboť v těchto
Novák . . . neboť v těchto
31
Ţáček V těchto bouřlivých časech
bouřlivých časech meč je
bouřlivých dobách meč je
je totiţ meč jak soudcem,
soudcem, ţalobcem i
soudcem, porotou,
tak porotou, ţalobcem i
popravčím . . . (121)
ţalobcem i katem . . . (132)
vykonavatelem . . . (115)
Peter Newmark proposes five possible procedures of metaphor translation (48 – 9):
1. Translating a metaphor using the same or a similar image; 2. Translating it with a different image that has the same sense; 3. Converting the metaphor into a simile; 4. Translation of metaphor by simile plus sense; 5. Conversion of metaphor into sense.
As has been already mentioned, English and Czech cultures are not so remote to cause problems in translating metaphors or to force translators to recreate them. Therefore, the first method was used by the translators of the Jerome‘s novel in the majority of cases. The use of this mode is possible if the image has comparable frequency and validity in the target language (Alvarez 484), as in this example:
Had it been a Richard there! the cup of liberty might have been dashed from England‘s lips, and the taste of freedom held back for a hundred years. (Jerome 110)
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
Kdyby to byl býval některý
Být na jeho místě takový
Kdyby tu tak seděl
Richard! Číše volnosti by
Richard! Pak pohár
Richard! Anglii by se ještě
byla bývala odtrţena od rtů
svobody mohl být ještě
mohl od rtů vyrazit kalich
Anglie a ještě sto let by
odtrţen od rtů Anglie,
svobody; mohla by si na
32
byla Anglie čekala, neţ by
takţe by ještě stovky let ne- svobodu nechat zajít chuť
poznala, jak chutná
poznala, jak chutná
svoboda. (124)
volnost. (135)
ještě nějakých sto let. (117)
Even though the translators choose different solutions for the word ‗cup‘, they still preserve the sense of the metaphor and the cup‘s relation to the lips of personified England. Since the metaphor of ‗the cup of . . .‘ is widely used in Czech as well (‗pohár hořkosti‘, ‗číše zapomnění‘), the translations are perfectly understandable for Czech readers. When analysing metaphors in the novel, I have come across only two applications of Newmark‘s second mode of metaphor translation, i.e. replacing the source language image by different image with the same sense, both by Milan Ţáček:
It is difficult enough to fix a tent in dry weather; in wet, the task becomes herculean. (Jerome 19)
Postavit stan je obtíţné, i kdyţ neprší; za deště se tento úkol stává hodným Sisyfa. (Ţáček 24)
While Henzl and Novák retain the image of Hercules in their translations (‗herkulovská úloha‘, ‗herkulovská práce‘, respectively), Ţáček chooses to describe the task as that of Sysiphus. The images are almost the same, referring to the tremendous effort required to accomplish the task, Ţáček only makes the task unending and futile. The second case is as follows:
Dear old Quarry Woods! . . . how scented to this hour you seem with memories of sunny summer days! (Jerome 123)
33
Jak nás utěšují stromy, . . . jak nás aţ do této chvíle prostupují vzpomínkami na slunečné letní dny! (Ţáček 132)
Henzl and Novák again preserve the original image of pleasant smell (‗voníte vzpomínkami‘) whereas Ţáček opts for the Czech verb ‗prostoupit‘ which corresponds with Jerome‘s idea as well (i.e. plenty of memories associated with the woods) but deprives it of the poetic olfactory sensation. Only one case of translating the metaphor by a simile was found. It is applied by J. Z. Novák and it works equally to the original:
. . . and they both sighed, and sat down, with the air of early Christian martyrs trying to make themselves comfortable up against the stake. (Jerome 62)
. . . načeţ si obě povzdychly a usedly, tváříce se jako mučednice z prvních dob křesťanství, které se snaţí zaujmout u kůlu pozici co nejpohodlnější. (Novák 77)
The modes of transferring the metaphor by simile plus sense (Newmark mentions this example: ‗he is a lion‘ developed into ‗he is as brave as a lion‘) and of converting the metaphor into sense were not registered in the novel. Until now I have been dealing with the translation of original metaphors or metaphors that are invented by an author and that are not hackneyed and stereotyped. In the following paragraphs I will focus on the translation of idioms – expressions that Newmark counts into stock metaphors. Idioms are expressions or phrases that have fixed meanings. They can sometimes present translation problems because ―they contain more than one word but form a single unit of meaning‖ (Menacere 570). Thus, if the words are interpreted individually, then the whole cluster of those words does not make sense. Another 34
obstacle in translation of idioms can arise when an idiom is culturally specific and when translated literally, the target readership does not understand. According to Menacere, a reasonable approach to translating idioms is to understand the idiom, interpret its meaning (emotive and aesthetic) and transfer the meaning in the target language (571). The three Czech translators render the idioms in two ways, both equally successful. First, they use Czech idiomatic equivalents where there are any or when the context makes it possible, as in these examples:
Jerome
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
. . . to sell your life
. . . prodáte svůj
. . . prodáte svůj
. . . svůj ţivot za
dearly . . . (21)
ţivot draho . . . (24)
ţivot draho . . . (26)
ţádných okolností tak lacino nedáte . . . (26)
You might look
Mohli jste na něho
Hodinu jste ho
Mohli jste ho celé
daggers at him for
celou hodinu vrhat
mohli probodávat
hodiny propichovat
an hour . . . (63)
vraţedné pohledy
očima . . . (78)
pohledem . . . (70)
. . . (73) . . . you couldn‘t
. . . za nic na světě
get a Referee for
tam neseţenete
love or money . . .
ilustrované časopisy
(12)
. . . (16)
. . . I didn‘t care a
. . . ţe mi houby
. . . na tom ţe mi
hang . . . (38)
záleţí . . . (43)
pendrek záleţí . . . (47)
I never can make
Z těch uţ jsem teda
S těmi si taky nevím
head or tail of
úplný jelen. (56)
rady. (51)
those. (45) She was nuts on
Panenská královna
Ta byla po
public-houses . . .
Anglie byla do
hospodách celá divá
(50)
krčem celá pryč.
. . . (62)
35
(58) . . . they are all the
. . . letos se po nich
rage this season . . .
můţou na řece
(79)
všichni utlouct. (87)
Secondly, if there is no idiomatic equivalent in Czech or when the idiom does not fit the context, they translate them with unidiomatic expressions with the same sense as that of the original idioms:
Jerome
Henzl
Novák
. . . you couldn‘t get . . . člověk tam
. . . ani za peníze,
a Referee for love
nenajde sportovního
ani za dobré slovo
or money . . . (12)
sudího ani z lásky,
tam člověk
ani za peníze
neseţene Milovníka
...
(14)
Ţáček
sportu . . . (15)
. . . I didn‘t care a
. . . ţe je mi dočista
hang . . . (38)
jedno . . . (43 – 4)
I never can make
V těch se vůbec
head or tail of
nevyznám. (51)
those. (45) She was nuts on
Anglická panenská
public-houses . . .
královna byla
(50)
hostinci přímo posedlá. (56)
. . . they are all the
. . . jsou teď strašně
To je tuhle sezónu
rage this season . . .
v módě . . . (91)
strašně v módě. (99)
(79) . . . and he would
. . . proto pro jistotu . . . a tak se prý
. . . a dá přednost
rather be on the
nebude . . . (155)
jistotě . . . (148)
safe side . . . (139)
radši přidrţí toho, co je vyzkoušeno . . . (170) 36
Peter Newmark claims that similes ―are the poor cousins of metaphors‖ as they ―have none of the power and the incisiveness of metaphors‖ (Paragraphs 19). However, Jerome‘s Three Men in a Boat abounds with them, their main function being to describe and illustrate the events and incidents in both the humorous and poetic parts of the novel. They normally do not cause any problems in translating and are predominantly translated literally, as the translator does not have any reason to change or recreate them (Newmark, Paragraphs 19). This is the case in most instances of similes in Jerome‘s novel. Here are some examples:
Jerome
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
. . . yet harmless,
. . . neškodné jako
. . . neškodné jako
. . . zároveň
mind you, as the
nenarozené
nenarozené batole.
neškodný jako
babe unborn. (53)
nemluvně. (61)
(66)
novorozeně. (60)
It is like the sunset
Je jako západ slunce Jako západ slunce a
Je jako západ
and the stars . . .
a hvězdy . . . (63)
slunce a hvězdy . . .
hvězdy . . . (69)
(55) . . . and had begun
(62) . . . a začal je
. . . a jal se je
. . . a začal je
to unravel it as if he rozvíjet jako by
rozvíjet, jako kdyby
odmotávat, jako by
were taking the
snímal plenky z
odmotával plenky s
šlo o zavinovačku
swaddling clothes
novorozeněte. (93)
novorozeněte . . .
novorozence . . .
(101)
(89)
off a new-born infant . . . (81) . . . with a noise
. . . s takovým
. . . s takovým
. . . za hlomozu,
like the ripping up
rámusem, jako kdyţ
randálem, jako
jako by se páralo
of forty thousand
se trhá čtyřicet tisíc
kdyby se naráz
čtyřicet tisíc
linen sheets. (85)
lněných prostěradel.
roztrhlo čtyřicet
plátěných
(97)
tisíc plátěných
prostěradel. (92)
prostěradel. (105) . . . all human life
. . . celý ţivot leţí
. . . leţí před námi 37
. . . jak se před námi
lies like a book
před námi jako
celý lidský ţivot
lidský ţivot otvírá
before us
kniha. (112)
jako kniha . . . (121
jako kniha . . . (106)
. . . (98)
– 2)
In the above examples, the Czech translators preserve, more or less, the same images as presented in the original. However, there are some cases in which the translators opt to use different, even though equally applicable, images:
Jerome
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
. . . standing there
Stojíš tu jako
Stojíš tady jako kus
. . . stojíš jak
like a stuffed
vycpaná múmie . . .
polena . . . (114 – 5)
vycpaný panák . . .
mummy . . . (92 –
(106)
(100)
3) I had an idea it
Představoval jsem
Tenkrát jsem si
Myslel jsem si, ţe
came natural to a
si, ţe to přijde
představoval, ţe na
jim člověk přijde na
body, like rounders
samo, jako kdyţ si
to kaţdý přijde hned kloub stejně
and touch. (159)
člověk hraje s
napoprvé sám jako
míčem. (176)
při hře na babu nebo střílení z praku.
přirozeně jako třeba
na škatule. (193)
(168) . . . místo abychom
. . . instead of being
. . . místo aby se s
. . . uţ to s námi
pitched and thrown
námi třepalo a
nehází a nehrká jako sebou nechali házet
about like peas in a
házelo jako s
s hrášky v chrastítku jako hadr na holi
bladder . . . (161)
hrachem v měchu
. . . (196)
. . . (170)
. . . (178)
I have also come across a simile which had to be adapted since it, translated literally, would sound unnatural in Czech:
Jerome . . . holding on to
Henzl . . . drţe se okrajů
Novák . . . s rukama
38
Ţáček Rukama se zarputile
the sides of the boat
člunu jako klíště.
křečovitě
like grim death . . .
(78)
svírajícíma luby lodi
(68)
drţel boků . . . (75)
. . . (85)
The expression ‗drţet se jako hrozná/krutá/nemilosrdná smrt‘ as an equivalent to ‗hold on tight‘ would not make sense to Czech readers; that is why the translators have to come up with other solutions. Henzl uses the idiomatic expression ‗drţet se jako klíště‘ which is a very successful translation. On the other hand, Novák and Ţáček recreate the simile into adverbs (‗křečovitě‘ and ‗zarputile‘, respectively). These are good solutions as well but they lack the comic effect of the original simile. Personification – the last category of metaphor mentioned in the theoretical part of this chapter – does not represent any translation problem and is usually preserved in translations. As the three translators of Jerome‘s novel do not change or adapt the personifications in Three Men in a Boat in any way, I will only offer one example of their renderings by way of illustration:
Jerome
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
Possibly the result
Snad je tento
Ţe to tak dopadlo, to
Moţná k tomuto
may have been
výsledek nutno
lze patrně přičíst
výsledku přispěla
brought about by
přičíst přirozené
pouze přirozené
přirozená
the natural
nepovolnosti všech
zlomyslnosti všech
zarputilost věcí
obstinacy of all
věcí na tomto světě.
věcí na tomto světě.
vezdejších. Loďka
things in this
Moţná, ţe loďka
Ta loď
snad došla k
world. The boat
podlehla dojmu,
pravděpodobně, pod
závěru, ţe jsme se
may possibly have
který v ní vzbudilo
dojmem zcela
vydali spáchat
come to the
povrchní
povrchního úsudku o
ranní sebevraţdu, a
conclusion,
pozorování naší
našem chování, došla
rozhodla se, ţe nás
judging from a
činnosti, a usoudila,
k náhledu, ţe jsme si
zklame. To je
cursory view of
ţe jsme si vyjeli
vyjeli spáchat hned
jediná domněnka, o
39
our behaviour, that
spáchat sebevraţdu,
po ránu sebevraţdu, a
níţ se s vámi mohu
we had come out
a proto si umínila,
v důsledku toho si
podělit. (169)
for a morning‘s
ţe nás zklame. To
umínila, ţe nám ji
suicide, and had
je jediné vysvětlení,
překazí. Nic jiného
thereupon
které mohu
mě nenapadá. (195)
determined to
nabídnout. (178)
disappoint us. That is the only suggestion I can offer. (160 – 1)
Since the metaphors in Three Men in a Boat are not culture-specific and the images and symbols contained in them are well-understandable for Czech readers, they do not cause difficulties in translating and do not require any special renderings on the part of the Czech translators. As for Newmark‘s proposed modes of translating metaphors, the way of translating metaphors using the same or a similar image is most frequently employed. If a metaphor is modified in some way, it is the translator‘s own initiative (i.e. it was not due to cultural reasons) and the sense and effect of the original metaphor are preserved. As far as the translation of idioms is concerned, the translators either substitute them with Czech idiomatic equivalents or, if this is not possible, they replace them with unidiomatic expressions with the same sense. Both these approaches prove to be successful. Similes and personifications are probably the easiest categories of metaphor to translate. The overwhelming majority of similes is rendered literally and all the cases of personifications are retained. In my opinion, the translators manage to keep the balance between the source and target metaphorical language with no excessive losses or gains in the target text.
40
4 Register 4.1
Register in Three Men in a Boat
The term register is used to ―describe the fact that the kind of language we use is affected by the context in which we use it, to such an extent that certain kinds of language usage become conventionally associated with particular situations‖ (Montgomery 55). Thus, we would use different register when speaking to friends (informal, familiar language) and to superiors or strangers (formal, polite language). Among the main social determinants that influence our choice of register are: age, sex, class, occupation, religion, country of origin, generation, schooling etc. Moreover, our choice of register is conditioned by the mode (written vs. spoken) and the occasion in which it is used (Newmark, Approaches 121). Montgomery (56) defines three different aspects of any situation or context which will affect the register: the mode of communication – this relates to whether the language is written or spoken; the tone, which is connected to the social relationships between the participants in the situation (formal vs. informal, personal vs. impersonal relationships); and the field, i.e. the purpose the language is used for (e.g. to convey information, to express feelings, to intimidate, etc.) and the activities or professions it is characteristic of (e.g. the register of legal profession, advertising, football commentary, journalism and so on). Since each of us switches naturally and smoothly from one register to another and since we know which register is appropriate in a certain situation, we are all sensitive to deviation in register (Montgomery 56). Many authors of humorous literature rely on this sensitivity and employ registers inappropriately to create humour and humorous situations. The same does J. K. Jerome in his Three Men in a Boat. He makes 41
use of very formal register to exaggerate certain situations or problems and thus makes them more comic:
We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. Reach not after morality and righteousness, my friends; watch vigilantly your stomach, and diet it with care and judgment. Then virtue and contentment will come and reign within your heart, unsought by any effort of your own; and you will be a good citizen, a loving husband, and a tender father – a noble, pious man. (Jerome 94 – 5)
This formal, almost philosophical in tone, statement follows J.‘s account of how proper dinner made the three characters content and blissful after a long day. The grand tone of this ―recommendation‖ is apparently incongruous with the ordinary situation of eating and thus makes it sound comic. Jerome also uses formal language to establish irony. When the character of George asks a lock-keeper for some drinking water, the keeper maliciously offers him to take as much as he wants, pointing to the river and saying that he has drunk the river water for the last fifteen years without any harm. George, in response to the keeper‘s impoliteness, uses formal and very polite language to make an ironic insult:
George told him that his appearance, after the course, did not seem a sufficiently good advertisement for the brand; and that he would prefer it out of a pump. (Jerome 132)
Informal register appears frequently in the novel as well and it serves to reinforce the comic elements in the situations and to mock the characters. Jerome uses colloquial language that can be found both in the narrative and the direct speech, as in the following examples:
42
This was hardly what I intended. What I had meant, of course, was, that I should boss the job, and that Harris and George should potter about under my directions . . . (Jerome 37)
―Well, I don‘t know, gents,‖ replied the noble fellow, ―but I suppose some train‘s got to go to Kingston; and I‘ll do it. Gimme the half-crown.‖ (Jerome 49)
The colloquial language of villagers is also employed (only in direct speech) to make the distinction between the three main characters, who come from the middle class, and the ‗Arrys and ‗Arriets – ―a term coined by the middle-classes to describe the lower-classes‖ (Nicholas 60). In some cases it shows the villagers‘ simplicity and helps to make the mockery of them more profound, as it is with the character of slow-witted churchyard keeper:
―I‘m a-coming, sur, I‘m a-coming. I‘m a little lame. I ain‘t as spry as I used to be. This way, sur.‖ ―Go away, you miserable old man,‖ I said. ―I‘ve come as soon as I could, sur,‖ he replied. ―My missis never see you till just this minute. You follow me, sur.‖ (Jerome 65)
As I already mentioned, using certain register inappropriately (the above example concerning stomach) is one of the devices for achieving humorous effect. Another register-based method for creating humour involves juxtaposition or mixing of different registers:
The quaint back streets of Kingston, where they came down to the water‘s edge, looked quite picturesque in the flashing sun-light, the glinting river with its 43
drifting barges, the wooded towpath, the trim-kept villas on the other side, Harris, in a red and orange blazer, grunting away at the sculls, the distant glimpses of the grey old palace of the Tudors, all made a sunny picture, so bright but calm, so full of life, and yet so peaceful that, early in the day though it was, I felt myself being dreamily lulled off into a musing fit. (Jerome 49)
The above quoted surroundings description written in highly poetic register is suddenly interrupted in the middle by a commonplace remark on Harris‘s intensive sculling (underlined), which somehow surprises the reader, spoils the poetic, serious tone of the extract and forces the reader to realise a new – humorous – dimension of the utterance. Alison Ross mentions a further device for register-based humour – bathos. Bathos is ―a sudden switch in style, from one which has grand overtones to one which is commonplace‖ (45). There are about four cases of bathos in Three Men in a Boat; here is one example by way of illustration:
. . . and, lulled by the lapping water and the rustling trees, we fall asleep beneath the great, still stars, and dream that the world is young again – young and sweet as she used to be ere the centuries of fret and care had furrowed her fair face, ere her children‘s sins and follies had made old her loving heart – sweet as she was in those bygone days when, a new made mother, she nursed us, her children, upon her own deep breast – ere the wiles of painted civilisation had lured us away from her fond arms, and the poisoned sneers of artificiality had made us ashamed of the simple life we led with her, and the simple, stately home where mankind was born so many thousands of years ago. Harris said: ―How about when it rained?‖ You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris – no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never ―weeps, he knows not why.‖ If Harris‘s eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop. (Jerome 18) 44
In this example, Jerome suddenly switches from poetic, lofty style to commonplace language describing Harris‘s practicality. The difference is even amplified by the sentence length – the poetic part is formed by one, very long sentence; while the following text is composed of relatively short sentences (underlined). The vocabulary and particularly the combination of words play an important role as well. In the first part, poetic devices such as vivid imagery (‗rustling trees‘, ‗painted civilisation‘, ‗poisoned sneers of artificiality‘ etc.) and personification (the world is personified – young, her face, her loving heart) are used; the subsequent part is formed of words of everyday language and does not involve any unusual combinations of words. Ross also speaks about the method of building up balanced phrases from which the final one drops in register or style to form a sort of anti-climax (44). The method is used by Jerome when urging the readers not to burden their lives with unnecessary things:
Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. (Jerome 27)
In this example, Jerome begins in a noble way to name things and people one would not do without in their lives. Towards the end, however, he proceeds to things (underlined) that are not expected in such a clichés-based utterance (i.e. ‗pipes‘, ‗drink‘ – in this case, the word ‗drink‘ is ambiguous as it can refer both to alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverage).
45
4.2
Translation of Register
Unfortunately, there is not much specialised literature that would offer any useful and detailed approaches to the translation of register. I will therefore draw only on Newmark‘s opinion of how to render register in translation and Levý‘s attitude to dialect translation. Peter Newmark (Approaches 121) thinks that the main interest to a translator when dealing with register is the lexical field (including characteristic word ‗deformations‘ and syntactic markers), which s/he should recognise in the source text and transfer to the target text. In chapter seventeen, J. and George are sitting in a pub, meeting different village people who tell them the story of how they caught the big trout that is displayed there in a glass case. It is obvious that the villagers make the stories up and when another man enters the pub, George decides to put his truthfulness to the test, using inappropriate, highly formal language:
―I beg your pardon, I hope you will forgive the liberty that we – perfect strangers in the neighbourhood – are taking, but my friend here and myself would be so much obliged if you would tell us how you caught that trout up there.‖ (Jerome 172)
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
„Promiňte, doufám, ţe nám „Promiňte, prosím. Snad se
„Prosím za prominutí,
– lidem zde úplně cizím –
na nás nebudete zlobit, ţe
doufám, ţe nám – coby
prominete naši smělost, ale
si troufáme vás oslovit,
naprosto neznámým lidem –
můj přítel i já bychom vám
ačkoliv jsme tady v těch
odpustíte tuto neomalenost,
byli velmi vděčni,
končinách úplně cizí, ale
ale můj přítel i já sám
kdybyste nám laskavě
tuhle můj přítel i já bychom bychom vám byli velmi
vylíčil, jak jste chytil
vám byli velice vděčni,
zavázáni, kdybyste nám
tohohle pstruha.― (191)
kdybyste nám pověděl, jak
řekl, jak jste dokázal chytit
jste ulovil támhletoho
tady toho pstruha.― (181)
46
pstruha.― (208)
Jerome uses features of politeness, among them words of politeness (‗I beg your pardon‘), conditional mood and highly formal and noble words such as ‗forgive the liberty we are taking‘ and ‗obliged‘. In my opinion, the Czech translators succeed in transferring the excessively high level of formality into Czech. They all recognise the lexical field (words of politeness, formal words and the conditional) and use the Czech equivalents (underlined) to create the same comic effect as in the original. In his Umění překladu, Jiří Levý comments on translation of regional dialect. He claims that it is impossible to characterise a speaker as, let‘s say, a Bavarian by Czech linguistic devices. A translator can only manage to distinguish between the language of a villager and the national language. To indicate rural language, it is advisable to use linguistic features that are regionally unmarked, i.e. features that are not perceived as specific for a certain dialect and thus are related to a more general perception of rural areas (126). This suggestion for treating dialect in translation could be also applied to the translation of rural language in Three Men in a Boat. The translation of colloquial language and especially of language of villagers involves greater variety on the part of the novel‘s translators. For example, in the following extract J. meets a party of ‗Arrys and ‗Arriets (i.e. young village people) and asks them where the Wallingford lock is. They answer in this way:
―Wallingford lock!‖ they answered. ―Lor‘ love you, sir, that‘s been done away with for over a year. There ain‘t no Wallingford lock now, sir. You‘re close to Cleeve now. Blow me tight if ‗ere ain‘t a gentleman been looking for Wallingford lock, Bill!‖ (Jerome 90)
47
Non-standard, colloquial form of English is evidently used in this example. Short forms such as ‗ain‘t‘, ‗‘ere‘, and exclamations like ‗Lor‘ love you‘ and ‗blow me tight‘ indicate that the characters do not use standard language. Despite this fact, Vladimír Henzl uses standard Czech in his translation:
„Wallingfordské zdymadlo!― odpověděli. „Pro pána krále, pane, to uţ je přes rok zrušeno. Wallingfordské zdymadlo uţ není, pane. Jste uţ blízko Cleeve. Bille, podrţ mě, on hledá wallingfordské zdymadlo!― (102)
Henzl opts for rather formal language which one would not expect from young village people and thus spoils Jerome‘s intention to vivify the narration by the rural language and to differentiate the villagers from the middle-class characters of J., George and Harris. The only colloquialisms he preserves are the exclamations ‗pro pána krále‘ and ‗podrţ mě‘. Novák, on the other hand, employs colloquial Czech (obecná čeština) of which it is typical to replace final ‗-é‘ in adjectives by ‗ý‘ and vowel ‗y‘ by ‗ej‘ (‗wallingfordský zdejmadlo‘), and to add ‗v‘ in front of words beginning with ‗o‘ (vostatně, von). His renderings are regionally unmarked which corresponds to Levý‘s recommendation. Moreover, he enhances the rural tone of the utterance by colloquial exclamations ‗pánbu s váma‘ and ‗to mě teda podrţ‘:
„Wallingfordský zdejmadlo?― odpověděli. „Pánbu s váma, pane, to uţ je přeci přes rok zbouraný. To uţ je přeci pryč, wallingfordský zdejmadlo. A tady jste vostatně aţ skoro u Cleeve. To mě teda podrţ, Bille, von ten pán hledá wallingfordský zdejmadlo!― (111)
48
Finally, Milan Ţáček seems to be inconsistent in his rendering of register. In the beginning he chooses standard Czech (‗wallingfordské zdymadlo‘, ‗ţádné zdymadlo‘), at the end he switches to colloquial ‗wallingfordský zdymadlo‘. The overall tone of his translation is definitely less colloquial than that of Novák; it is rather closer to Henzl‘s rendering:
„Wallingfordské zdymadlo!― odpověděli mi. „Tak to Bůh s vámi, pane, to uţ víc neţ rok nestojí. Teď uţ ţádné wallingfordské zdymadlo není. Blíţíte se ke Cleeve. Bille, to mě teda podrţ, tenhle pán opravdu hledá wallingfordský zdymadlo!― (97)
The ways in which the three translators render the colloquial register follow the same pattern throughout the novel. Henzl uses standard Czech, sometimes even more formal than it is necessary, and thus does not preserve the colloquial tone of some of the novel‘s parts. Novák employs as much colloquial expressions as possible, and Ţáček seems to stick to ―the golden mean‖ as he tries to express a certain level of colloquiality but does not make use of so many colloquialisms as Novák does. This can be observed in the already mentioned example in which non-standard English is used by the churchyard keeper:
―I‘m a-coming, sur, I‘m a-coming. I‘m a little lame. I ain‘t as spry as I used to be. This way, sur.‖ ―Go away, you miserable old man,‖ I said. ―I‘ve come as soon as I could, sur,‖ he replied. ―My missis never see you till just this minute. You follow me, sur.‖ (Jerome 65)
49
Here are the translators‘ solutions:
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
„Uţ jdu, pane, uţ jdu. Jsem „Uţ du, vašnosti, uţ du. Já
„Uţ se blíţím, vašnosto, uţ
trochu chromý. Uţ nejsem
to bude. Trochu kulhám.
kapánek kulhám. Uţ
tak čiperný, jak jsem býval. nejsem takovej čipera, jako
Nejsem takový čipera jako
Tudy, pane.―
zamlada. Tudy, vašnosto.―
sem bejval. Ráčej tuhle, vašnosti.―
„Jděte pryč, vy bídný
„Zmizte, dědku mizerná!―
„Běţ pryč, dědku jedna
starče,― řekl jsem.
křikl jsem.
ubohá,― utrousil jsem.
„Nemohl jsem přijít dřív,
„Dřív sem přijít nemoh,
„Přišel jsem, co nejdřív to
pane. Má ţena vás viděla
vašnosti,― odpověděl.
šlo, vašnosto,― odpověděl.
teprve před chvílí. Pojďte
„Moje panička jich
„Bába vás vţdycky uvidí aţ
za mnou, pane.― (75)
zmerčila teprvá teď, v
na poslední chvíli. Pojďte
poslední chvíli. Ráčej za
za mnou, vašnosto.― (72)
mnou, vašnosti.― (81 – 2)
Henzl again employs standard Czech which does not match the colloquial original text and spoils the comic effect and mockery created by the use of the colloquial language. Novák successfully transfers the original colloquiality into the Czech version by using colloquialisms and colloquial forms (‗du‘, ‗takovej‘,‘ bejval‘, ‘nemoh‘, ‗teprvá‘), by employing the address in third person plural (‗ráčej za mnou‘) and the expression ‗vašnosti‘, which is a very polite way of address and evokes the atmosphere of the past. Ţáček does not use the colloquial forms of words but tries to indicate the speech of a villager by using colloquialisms such as ‗vašnosto‘ and ‗bába‘, referring to the keeper‘s wife. Translation of the register-based methods for creating humour should not cause any major problems as it basically involves a change of register. Still, there are some
50
differences between the three Czech translations. In the following example two registers – formal and slightly colloquial (underlined) – are juxtaposed:
I impressed the fact upon George and Harris and told them that they had better leave the whole matter entirely to me. They fell into the suggestion with a readiness that had something uncanny about it. George put on a pipe and spread himself over the easy-chair, and Harris cocked his legs on the table and lit a cigar. (Jerome 36 – 7)
The first sentence of the extract is formal in tone, the expression ‗impressed the fact upon‘ being employed, whereas in the rest of the extract the language becomes more colloquial since the phrasal verbs (‗fall into‘, ‗put on‘) and expressions such as ‗spread himself‘ and ‗cocked his legs‘ are used. What follows are the translators‘ renderings of this passage:
Henzl Tuto skutečnost jsem
Novák Důtklivě jsem George i
Ţáček Tuto skutečnost jsem sdělil
vyloţil Jiřímu a Harrisovi a Harrise na tuto skutečnost
i Georgeovi a Harrisovi a
řekl jsem jim, ţe bude
upozornil a radil jsem jim,
řekl jsem jim, aby celou
nejlepší, kdyţ celou
aby to všechno nechali na
záleţitost nechali zcela na
záleţitost úplně přenechají
mne. Skočili na ten návrh s
mně. Na tento návrh
mně. Přijali tento návrh s
ochotou, která se mi hned
přistoupili s rychlostí, v níţ
ochotou, která měla v sobě
nějak nezamlouvala.
se zračilo cosi aţ
cosi neslušného. Jiří si
George si nacpal dýmku a
zlověstného. George si
zapálil dýmku a rozvalil se
rozvalil se v lenošce a
zapálil dýmku a rozvalil se
v lenošce a Harris dal nohy
Harris si dal nohy na stůl a
v křesle, Harris si poloţil
na stůl a zapálil si doutník.
zapálil si doutník. (45)
nohy na stůl a zapálil si
(41)
doutník. (42)
51
In Henzl‘s and Ţáček‘s translations the transition to informal and colloquial language is not quite apparent. The only expression that suggests informality is that of ‗rozvalil se‘, the rest of the passage sounds formal. There is a higher level of informality in Novák‘s version, since he uses more colloquial expressions (underlined). It is surprising that none of the translators renders the expression ‗cocked his legs‘ colloquially in Czech as it offers at least one solution that would fit the context more suitably – ‗hodil (si) nohy na stůl‘. As for bathos, or a sudden switch in style, differences in the Czech renderings occur as well. In the following passage, the first direct speech is formed by poetic, pensive language, while in the second direct speech the author switches to commonplace, dispassionate style thus creating humorous effect:
―Hark! do you not hear? Is it but the mermaids singing deep below the waving waters; or sad spirits, chanting dirges for white corpses, held by seaweed?‖ Harris would take you by the arm, and say: ―I know what it is, old man; you‘ve got a chill. Now, you come along with me. I know a place round the corner here, where you can get a drop of the finest Scotch whisky you ever tasted – put you right in less than no time.‖ (Jerome 19)
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
„Poslouchej! Slyšíš? To
„Zmlkni! Coţ neslyšíš? To
„Poslouchej! Slyšíš?
zpívají mořské panny
nemůţe být nic jiného neţ
Nejsou to mořské panny, co
hluboko v rozvlněných
mořské panny pějící v
zpívají pod zvlněnými
vodách. Anebo jsou to
hlubinách těch zvlněných
vodami, nebo smutní
smutné ţalozpěvy duchů
vod. Či to truchlící duše
duchové zpívající
nad bledými mrtvolami, jeţ
lkají ţalozpěvy nad svými
ţalozpěvy za bílé umrlce
se zachytily v chaluhách?―
umrlými těly, zachycenými
uvězněné v chaluhách?―
ve spleti chaluh?― Harris by vás vzal za paţi a
Harris by vás vzal pod paţí 52
Harris by vás chytil za ruku
řekl by:
a řekl:
a pravil by:
„Tohle, kamaráde, znám;
„Já ti povím, co to je,
„Já vím, co to je, kamaráde;
nastydl jsi se. Půjdeš se
kamaráde. Leze na tebe
prochladl jsi. Pojď teď se
mnou. Vím tady o jednom
rýma. Pojď hezky se mnou,
mnou. Znám tu za rohem
místě za rohem, kde
já znám tadyhle za rohem
jeden lokál, kde ti nalejí tu
dostaneš kapku nejlepší
podniček, kde dostaneš
nejjemnější skotskou, jakou
skotské whisky, jakou jsi
nejlepší skotskou whisky,
jsi kdy ochutnal – neţ se
kdy pil – a ta tě okamţitě
jakou jsi kdy ochutnal, a ta
naděješ, budeš zase v
postaví na nohy.― (22)
tě v cuku letu postaví na
pořádku.― (24)
nohy.― (23 – 4)
All the translators successfully preserve the poetic and emotional tone of the first part. They also switch into commonplace and informal style in the second part, however, the level of informality in their translations differs. Novák employs a lot of colloquialisms such as ‗leze na tebe rýma‘ and a diminutive (‗podniček‘) which gives the utterance even more comic tone. Thus, his rendering is more profoundly in contrast with the poetic part and has a greater humorous effect. Henzl‘s and Ţáček‘s level of informality is not so high as that of Novák but the transition from the poetic to the commonplace is clear in their translations and they fulfill what is required by bathos – the sudden switch in style. To conclude this chapter on register, I would like to sum up the three Czech translators‘ approaches to dealing with register in Three Men in a Boat. Vladimír Henzl tends to stick to standard Czech in all the cases of register mentioned, i.e. formal, colloquial register and language of villagers. He avoids using colloquiality (except for occasional informal expressions that occur in spoken language – however, these expressions are still in the standard Czech forms) contained in the original and thus spoils a part of its humour. J. Z. Novák, on the other hand, employs standard Czech only when the original register is formal; in the parts of the original which are of colloquial 53
tone or in which villagers speak he opts for colloquial, regionally unmarked Czech. Finally, Milan Ţáček preserves the colloquiality and informality where necessary as well, but not to such an extent as Novák does. Concerning the level of colloquiality, he could be placed between the two very different poles represented by Henzl and Novák.
54
5 Pragmatics, Wordplay, Ambiguity 5.1
Pragmatics, Wordplay and Ambiguity in Three Men in a Boat
In a study concerning humorous devices, the concept of pragmatics must be definitely mentioned. Pragmatics focuses on ―the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader)‖ (Yule 3). In other words, it is concerned with the analysis of what people mean by their utterances rather than with the meanings of the individual words used in those utterances. In this kind of study it is necessary to consider the context in which the utterances occur and how the context influences what is said (Yule 3). Humour elicited by pragmatics relies on a gap between the sense and force of the utterance. The sense refers to the information an utterance conveys, whereas the force pertains to the variety of messages the utterance offers in a given context (Ross 39). Thus, misunderstanding may occur when a person misinterprets what is said by the speaker/writer and incorrectly infers, or deduces, the message. Here is an example from Three Men in a Boat, in which the three characters discuss what to pack for their trip:
―Begin with breakfast.‖ (George is so practical.) ―Now for breakfast we shall want a frying-pan‖ – (Harris said it was indigestible; but we merely urged him not to be an ass, and George went on) – ―a tea-pot and a kettle, and a methylated spirit stove.‖ (Jerome 30)
This example is based on the ambiguity of the phrase ‗we shall want a frying-pan‘. The intended meaning is easily retrievable from the context of the situation, however, Harris pretends to misinterpret George‘s utterance ‗we shall want a frying-pan‘ as ‗we shall
55
want to eat a frying-pan‘ instead of ‗we shall need a frying-pan‘. Therefore, he makes a remark about the frying-pan being indigestible, which creates a comic effect. Another possible source of ambiguity consists in the way speakers co-operate in a conversation. The philosopher H. P. Grice in his theory of co-operative principle suggests that in conversational interaction people rely on the assumption that a certain set of rules is in operation (Thomas 62). These rules should help them to avoid ambiguity and to interpret an utterance correctly. He also proposes four conversational maxims that contribute (if followed) to our understanding what the intended message of an utterance is (Thomas 63 – 4):
Maxim of quantity:
Make your contribution as informative as is required. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Maxim of quality:
Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Maxim of relation:
Be relevant.
Maxim of manner:
Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly.
If any of the maxims is not observed, or is flouted, the hearer has to make so-called ―conversational implicature‖, i.e. an assumption about what the implied meaning is. If the implicature does not correspond to the intended meaning, ambiguity or incongruity occurs in the conversation. This result is often employed by writers to create
56
pragmatics-based humour (Zemanová 29). In the following extract, Harris and J. have to sleep together in one bed and Harris asks his friend which side of the bed he prefers:
We tossed for beds, and Harris had to sleep with me. He said: ―Do you prefer the inside or the outside, J.?‖ I said I generally preferred to sleep inside a bed. (Jerome 40)
Here Harris flouts the maxim of quantity and manner when he does not give enough information about what the inside and the outside refer to (he could say ―the inside or the outside of the bed‖), thus creating ambiguity (in the bed or on the floor, for example). Even though the intended meaning is clear due to the context, J. takes advantage of Harris‘s flouting the maxims and makes an incorrect implicature in order to react wittily. The already mentioned phenomenon of ambiguity is closely related to puns and wordplay in general. Dirk Delabastita defines wordplay as ―the general name for the various textual phenomena in which structural features of the language(s) used are exploited in order to bring about a communicatively significant confrontation of two (or more) linguistic structures with more or less similar forms and more or less different meanings‖ (in Korhonen 10). The ambiguity alone, however, is not the only trigger of humorous effect of wordplay. It is the context, either verbal or situational, that activates the resulting effect (Koponen 35). Wordplay is a powerful device for creating humour as it captures reader‘s attention because it stands out from the surrounding text. Ambiguity contained in wordplay can occur on phonological, graphological, morphological, lexical and syntactical level (Ross 8). In Jerome‘s novel lexical and syntactical ambiguities are most frequent. Syntax refers to ―the way that meaning is created by the structure of 57
words in a sentence‖ (Ross 20). Syntactical ambiguity occurs when there are two possible ways of grouping the words in relation to each other, as in this example:
For the next four days he lived a simple and blameless life on thin Captain‘s biscuits (I mean that the biscuits were thin, not the captain) and soda-water . . . (Jerome 14)
The syntactical ambiguity here lies in the possibility of interpreting the phrase ‗thin Captain‘s biscuits‘ in two ways – the Captain was thin or the biscuits were thin. Jerome immediately explains what he means in brackets and thus draws attention to the ambiguity even more. Another source of ambiguity is the lexicon, or vocabulary, of a language. Lexical ambiguity can be based on polysemy, i.e. ―the phenomenon of words having various, related meanings‖ (Ross 17) In the following extract, the three characters are sitting in their boat, being lifted by water in the lock and at the same time a photographer is going to take a picture of them. Suddenly, somebody tries to warn them against the danger of getting upset as the nose of their boat got stuck in the lock:
As we stood, waiting for the eventful moment, I heard someone behind call out: ―Hi! look at your nose.‖ I could not turn round to see what was the matter, and whose nose it was that was to be looked at. I stole a side-glance at George‘s nose! It was all right – at all events, there was nothing wrong with it that could be altered, I squinted down at my own, and that seemed all that could be expected also. ... We looked then, and saw that the nose of our boat had got fixed under the woodwork of the lock, while the in-coming water was rising all around it, and tilting it up. In another moment we should be over. (Jerome 175 – 6)
58
The author plays with the word ‗nose‘ which can refer both to the part of the face and the front part of a boat. Moreover, he reinforces the humorous tone of the situation by incorrect inference on the part of J. The phenomenon of idioms can be also exploited as a source of lexical ambiguity. An idiom is a group of words that should be perceived as a single unit as its meaning is different from the meanings of the individual words. Ambiguity occurs ―if the group of words can be interpreted both as an idiom and as individual words‖ (Ross 18). The example below presents Harris using an idiomatic expression ‗to a T‘, which means ‗exactly right‘, and J.‘s wrong inference that Harris talks about ‗tea‘, i.e. a light meal eaten in the early evening:
Harris, said, however, that the river would suit him to a ―T‖. I don't know what a ―T‖ is (except a six-penny one, which includes bread-and-butter and cake ad lib., and is cheap at the price, if you haven‘t had any dinner). (Jerome 16)
Jerome K. Jerome also employs repetition of certain words as a form of wordplay, as in the following extract in which J. uses the expression ‗to give worlds for mustard‘, meaning he desperately longs for a bit of mustard:
I don‘t think I ever in my life, before or since, felt I wanted mustard as badly as I felt I wanted it then. I don‘t care for mustard as a rule, and it is very seldom that I take it at all, but I would have given worlds for it then. I don‘t know how many worlds there may be in the universe, but anyone who had brought me a spoonful of mustard at that precise moment could have had them all. . . . Harris said he would have given worlds for mustard, too. It would have been a good thing for anybody who had come up to that spot with a can of mustard then; he would have been set up in worlds for the rest of his life. (Jerome 118) 59
Pragmatics and wordplay represent a very effective well of humour, whether the device used is the gap between what is intended and what is inferred, flouting of any maxim of the co-operative principle, or the exploitation of the phenomenon of ambiguity. However, translation of these devices may be really challenging for a translator since the source language linguistic characteristics employed for creating humour often do not correspond to those of the target language.
5.2
Translation of Pragmatics-based Devices, Wordplay and Ambiguity
As for translation, the pragmatic devices – the gap between the sense and force of an utterance (i.e. the gap between what is intended and what is interpreted) and maxim flouting – do not represent any insuperable problem. What could become a stumbling block, however, is the necessity to create ambiguity in the target text since ambiguity is a phenomenon on which the pragmatic expedients of humour often build upon. Peter Newmark claims that ―in all cases of linguistic ambiguity, the translator has to bear in mind that the ambiguity may be deliberate, in which case it is his job to reproduce it, even if it means expanding the original‖ (25). As the ambiguity in Three Men in a Boat is supposed to produce humorous effect, one can assume that the ambiguity is deliberate and thus should be preserved. Let us see what the Czech translators‘ solutions to the ambiguity in the already mentioned extract concerning the breakfast and the frying-pan are:
Jerome ―Begin with
Henzl
Novák
„Začneme snídaní.―
Ţáček
„Začneme snídaní.― „Začněme u 60
breakfast.‖ (George
(Jiří je tak
(George je velice
snídaně.― (George a
is so practical.)
praktický.) „Tedy k
praktický.) „Tak
ta jeho praktičnost!)
―Now for breakfast
snídani budeme
tedy k snídani
„Ke snídani budeme
we shall want a
potřebovat pánev –―
budeme potřebovat
potřebovat pánev― -
frying-pan‖ –
(Harris podotkl, ţe
pánev,― (Harris
(Harris podotkl, ţe
(Harris said it was
je nestravitelná; my
řekl, ta ţe je těţko
je nestravitelná, ale
indigestible; but we
jsme ho jen důrazně
stravitelná; ale my
varovali jsme ho, ať
merely urged him
napomenuli, aby
jsme ho prostě
si nedělá blázny,
not to be an ass,
nebyl osel, a Jiří
vybídli, aby
načeţ George
and George went
pokračoval): „ –
neblbnul, a George
pokračoval) -
on) – ―a tea-pot and
konvici na čaj,
pokračoval)
„konvici na vaření
a kettle, and a
kotlík a lihový
„konvici na čaj,
vody, konvici na čaj
methylated spirit
vařič.― (35)
kotlík a lihový
a vařič na
vařič.― (38)
denaturovaný líh.―
stove.‖ (30)
(36)
In this example, the ambiguity is based on the phrase ‗for breakfast we shall want a frying-pan‘ which can be interpreted as ‗we shall want to eat a frying-pan‘ or ‗we shall need a frying-pan‘. The Czech translators opt for the Czech word ‗potřebovat‘ which in the phrase ‗k snídani budeme potřebovat pánev‘ can be understood in two ways as well – as ‗we shall need it for using‘ or ‗we shall need it for eating it‘. Even though the misinterpretation is highly improbable (thanks to the context and the general knowledge), the translators succeed in retaining the ambiguity and the humorous effect. In the second example presented in this chapter, the task was surely more difficult:
Jerome
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
―Do you prefer the
„Jsi raději na kraji
„Chceš spát radši u
„J., chceš spát
inside or the
nebo u zdi?―
zdi nebo dál ode
uvnitř, nebo vně?―
outside, J.?‖
zdi?― zeptal se mne. 61
I said I generally
Odpověděl jsem, ţe
Odpověděl jsem, to
Odpověděl jsem, ţe
preferred to sleep
nejraději jsem v
ţe je mi jedno, jen
zpravidla dávám
inside a bed. (40)
posteli. (45)
kdyţ to bude v
přednost spaní
posteli. (50)
uvnitř postele. (46)
Here the ambiguity lies in the words ‗the inside or the outside‘ by which Harris intends to say ‗the inside or the outside of the bed‘, but J. wrongly interprets it as ‗in or out of the bed‘. As there are no words in Czech that would allow the ambiguity to be preserved, Henzl and Novák drop the ambiguity and adapt J.‘s answer following their own creativity. In Henzl‘s solution, J. flouts the maxim of relation and quantity since his answer is not exactly relevant to what Harris asked and does not provide adequate information for Harris. The effect of Novák‘s translation is weaker than that of Hezl because Novák uses neither ambiguity nor pragmatic devices to produce humour. Thus, J.‘s answer sounds more phlegmatic than humorous. Finally, Ţáček retains the ambiguity, though at the cost of naturalness in Czech since ‗spát uvnitř postele‘ sounds rather clumsy. However, one can infer from the italicised form of ‗uvnitř‘ that this expression is used on purpose to elicit humour by using an unusual preposition. Puns and wordplay also rest on ambiguity. Translating wordplay can be a challenging task since it is often impossible to find a counterpart in the target language (Korhonen 21), as in the above example, and since the translator is bound to preserve it if s/he wants the translated text to have the same effect as the original. The difficulty of this task consists in the fact that ―the translator must usually solve the clash between the demand of semantic adequacy on the one hand, and stylistic and pragmatic adequacy on the other hand‖ (Poláčková 90). As homonymous expressions of the same semantic content in two different languages are very rare, Poláčková suggests that, when translating wordplay, the translator should transpose the information invariant, i.e. the
62
complex of semantic, stylistic and pragmatic information, into the target language text. This transposition is, of course, accompanied by necessary adaptations and adjustments that are carried out from a modification of a single expression to reorganising the whole text (90 – 1). In Delabastita‘s view, ―this leads to the paradox where the translator is able to be faithful to the source text in terms of its wordplay only through being unfaithful to the grammatical and lexical aspects‖ (in Koponen 43). According to Newmark, when ambiguity occurs within a lexical unit, the translator has several options of tackling it. First of all, s/he should attempt to retain the word with the same double meaning in the target language. If this is not possible, s/he may substitute a synonym with a comparable double meaning. The last two options are: distributing the two senses of one lexical unit over two or more lexical units, or sacrificing one of the two meanings (108). Leppihalme claims that when choosing a strategy for translating wordplay, the translator should also bear in mind the importance of different factors, such as the function of the wordplay, the expectations of the audience, and the norms and conventions of the target language (in Koponen 45). Let us see how the three Czech translators cope with the syntactical and lexical ambiguity contained in wordplay in Three Men in a Boat. I have come across two cases of syntactical ambiguity; the most interesting being this one:
Jerome
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
For the next four
Po příští čtyři dny
Celé příští čtyři dny
Další čtyři dny vedl
days he lived a
vedl prostý a
vedl prostý a
prostý a bezúhonný
simple and
bezúhonný ţivot,
bohulibý ţivot
ţivot s tenkými
blameless life on
ţivil se mizernými
pouze ve
kapitánskými
63
thin Captain‘s
kapitánovými
společnosti lodních
sušenkami
biscuits3 (I mean
suchary a sodovkou
sucharů (myslím
(nepatřily
that the biscuits
. . . (16)
tím opravdové
kapitánovi, to se jen
were thin, not the
suchary, nikoli
tak jmenovaly) a
captain) and soda-
členy lodní
vodou s
water . . . (14)
posádky, kteří měli
bublinkami. (18)
všichni veliký smysl pro humor) a sodovky. (17 – 8)
The order of words in this case (‗thin Captain‘s biscuits‘) causes syntactical ambiguity since the adjective ‗thin‘ can refer either to the Captain or the biscuits. Jerome, moreover, makes the ambiguity even more apparent by explaining it in the brackets. Henzl decides on leaving the ambiguity out, which, of course, deprives the text of the humorous tone. Novák, on the other hand, succeeds in transposing the information invariant (Poláčková) – i.e. ambiguity that is based on something light to eat, that is explained in brackets and that elicits humorous effect – and makes necessary adjustments: he changes the syntactical ambiguity into lexical one by using the Czech expression ‗suchar‘ which can relate both to a kind of light biscuits and to a person lacking a sense of humour, and recreates the explanation in brackets so that it is meaningful and humorous. Ţáček transposes the information invariant as well, but treats the whole wordplay differently. He translates the original phrase ‗thin Captain‘s biscuits‘ word for word, but since it is impossible to found the ambiguity on the adjective ‗thin‘ in this case, he shifts the ambiguity to the genitive form ‗kapitánskými‘ which can be interpreted as ‗belonging to a Captain‘ or ‗named after a Captain‘4. He
3
Probably biscuits made by Huntley & Palmers bakery. In 1830s the firm was selling around twenty kinds of biscuit, among them the Captain’s. 4 In my opinion, however, the word ‘kapitánovými’ would sound better and more natural.
64
also replaces the syntactical ambiguity by the lexical one and retains the explanation in brackets and the humorous tone of the extract. As for the second case of syntactical ambiguity, the translators use almost the same techniques as in the previous case: Henzl omits the wordplay, while Novák and Ţáček render it closely following the original. Even though the wordplay is preserved at the cost of natural word order in Czech, Novák‘s and Ţáček‘s translations are successful and acceptable:
Jerome
Novák
Ţáček
I begin to strike out Zoufale se snaţím
Zběsile sebou
Začnu zběsile
frantically for the
dosáhnout břehu,
plácám směrem k
máchat rukama,
shore, and wonder
uvaţuji, jestli se mi pobřeţí, pochybuju,
abych se dostal ke
if I shall ever see
ještě kdy podaří
ţe ještě někdy
břehu, přemýšlím,
home and friends
spatřit domov a
uvidím domov a
jestli ještě někdy
again, and wish I‘d
přátele, a lituji, ţe
přátele, a vyčítám si,
spatřím domov a
been kinder to my
jako chlapec jsem
proč jsem nebyl hod-
přátele, a přeji si,
little sister when a
nebyl hodnější ke
nější na svou
abych býval
boy (when I was a
své sestřičce. (33)
sestřičku v
hodnější na svou
klukovských letech
sestřičku za
(kdyţ jsem já byl v
chlapeckých let
klukovských letech,
(tedy za mých
pochopitelně, nikoli
chlapeckých let).
ona). (36)
(33 – 4)
boy, I mean). (29)
Henzl
The majority of instances of wordplay in the novel are created on the basis of polysemy which means that a word can have various, related meanings. It can sometimes happen that an expression with several meanings in source language has an equivalent expression with the same meanings in the target language:
65
Jerome
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
He says he‘ll teach
Říká, ţe vás naučí
Volá na vás, ţe vás
Říká, ţe vás naučí
you to take his
brát mu prkna a
naučí brát jeho
brát mu fošny a
boards and make a
dělat si z nich vor,
prkna a dělat si z
dělat si z nich vor,
raft of them; but,
ale poněvadţ to sám nich vor; ale
ale vzhledem k
seeing that you
uţ dobře umíte,
vzhledem k tomu,
tomu, ţe vy jste
know how to do this připadá vám tato
ţe to uţ docela
tuto činnost jiţ
pretty well already,
nabídka –
slušně umíte,
docela dobře zvládl,
the offer, though
nepochybně dobře
pokládáte tu jeho
nabídka, byť ji bez-
doubtless kindly
míněná – zbytečná a nabídku, i kdyţ
pochyby sděluje s
meant, seems a
ostýcháte se
nepochybně dobře
těmi nejlepšími
superfluous one on
obtěţovat ho jejím
míněnou, za zcela
úmysly, se vám z
his part, and you are přijetím. (169)
zbytečnou a
jeho strany jeví
reluctant to put him
ostýcháte se ji
poněkud zbytečná a
to any trouble by
přijmout, abyste mu
vám se nechce
accepting it (152).
nepřidělával práci.
vystavovat ho ja-
(185)
kýmkoli dalším obtíţím, pakliţe byste na ni přistoupil. (161)
This wordplay employs the ambiguity in the phrase ‗to teach somebody to do something‘ which can mean ‗to show somebody how to do something‘ or refer to a threat of punishment. In this case, the Czech translators do not have to adapt or even substitute the ambiguity of ‗naučit někoho něco/čemu‘ as it works in the same way in Czech and it retains the ironic tone of the original utterance. Nevertheless, this is not always the case. There are much more instances in which the source language polysemous expression has no applicable counterpart in the target language, and thus are more challenging from the point of view of translation:
66
Jerome
Henzl
Novák
Ţáček
As we stood,
Kdyţ jsme tak
A jak jsme tak čekali
Zatímco jsme čekali
waiting for the
stáli, čekajíce na
na ten pamětihodný
na tento památný
eventful moment,
významný
okamţik, najednou
okamţik, zaslechl
I heard someone
okamţik, slyšel
slyším, jak někdo za
jsem, jak někdo za
behind call out:
jsem, jak za mnou
mnou křičí:
námi zvolal:
někdo křičí: ―Hi! look at your
„Hej, podívejte se
„Hej! Pozor na levý
„Hej, vy tam!
nose.‖
na nos!―
bok!―
Koukejte na čumák!―
I could not turn
Nemohl jsem se
Nemohl jsem se
Nemohl jsem se
round to see what
otočit, abych se
pochopitelně
obrátit, abych se
was the matter,
podíval, co se děje
ohlédnout, abych
podíval, co se stalo a
and whose nose it
a kdo se má
zjistil, oč jde a kdo si
na čí čumák máme
was that was to be
podívat na nos.
to má na ten svůj
koukat. Jen jsem
looked at. I stole a
Kradmo a úkosem
levý bok dát pozor.
kradmo pohlédl na
side-glance at
jsem pohlédl na
Jen jsem se koutkem
Georgeův nos! Byl v
George‘s nose! It
Jiřího nos. Ten byl
oka rychle podíval
pořádku – nebo se s
was all right – at
v pořádku –
na levý bok
ním přinejmenším
all events, there
rozhodně na něm
Georgeův. S tím bylo nedělo nic, co by šlo
was nothing
nebylo nic
všechno v pořádku –
opravit. Zašilhal
wrong with it that
vadného, co by
takhle vsedě a pod
jsem i na svůj vlastní
could be altered, I
bylo třeba změnit.
kazajkou nebylo
a i ten se jevil, jak se
squinted down at
Zašilhal jsem na
naštěstí vidět, jak je
dalo očekávat.
my own, and that
svůj vlastní nos,
George v bocích
seemed all that
ale i ten, jak se
obtloustlý. A sám
could be expected
zdálo, nebyl jiný,
jsem se kvapně
also.
neţ se dalo
trošku narovnal a
očekávat.
povytáhl, abych levý bok příliš nevystrkoval.
... We looked then,
Podívali jsme se
Teprve teď jsme
To uţ jsme se
and saw that the
tedy a uviděli jsme,
sklopili pohledy a
otočili a spatřili
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nose of our boat
ţe nos našeho člunu zjistili jsme, ţe se
jsme, ţe přední část
had got fixed under
se zachytil pod
naše loď zachytila
našeho člunu se
the woodwork of
trámy zdymadla, ţe
levým bokem o
zachytila o
the lock, while the
voda kolem dokola
vyčnělý balvan ve
konstrukci
in-coming water
stoupá a naklání
stěně zdymadla a ţe
zdymadla, zatímco
was rising all
člun. (196)
stoupající voda
všude kolem nás uţ
around it, and
zvedá jenom náš
stoupala voda a
tilting it up. (175 –
pravý bok a chystá
nakláněla nás. (184
6)
se nás převrhnout.
– 5)
(212 – 3)
This situation takes place in the lock, the three men are sitting in the boat and preparing themselves to be photographed. The nose of their boat gets stuck in the woodwork of the lock and a man tries to warn them by shouting ‗look at your nose‘, without adding that he is referring to the nose of their boat (flouting the maxim of quantity), which causes misunderstanding on the part of J. In Czech there is no counterpart of the English word ‗nose‘ that would refer both to the part of the face and the front part of a boat, therefore, it is up to the translators to adapt the wordplay appropriately. In his translation, Henzl retains the direct equivalent of the word ‗nose‘, i.e. ‗nos‘ in Czech, which can be used to designate the part of the face, but when related to the front part of a boat, it sounds unnatural and clumsy. Even though the humour based on wrong inference is preserved in Henzl‘s version, the wordplay is rather distorted. Novák opts for substituting ‗nose‘ for a different body part – ‗bok‘ (‗hip‘ in English), as it can also refer to a side part of a boat. He keeps this ambiguity throughout the whole section dealing with the situation and makes necessary as well as optional adjustments, e.g. in the sentence ―S tím bylo všechno v pořádku — takhle vsedě a pod kazajkou nebylo naštěstí vidět, jak je George v bocích obtloustlý‖, he adds the information about George‘s chubby hips which is not present in the original. On the other hand, Ţáček 68
decides on using the expressive form of ‗nose‘, i.e. ‗čumák‘, which is a derogative expression for nose as well as a slang word for the front part of a boat. However, in the part of the text in which J. realizes that ‗nose‘ refers to the nose of their boat, Ţáček switches to using the phrase ‗přední část našeho člunu‘ which somewhat clarifies what ‗čumák‘ was related to and thus rather spoils the ambiguity. Nevertheless, as the relation between ‗čumák‘ and ‗přední část našeho člunu‘ is clear from the context, the wordplay is for the most part preserved. There is only one instance of ambiguity based on an idiom in the novel. The ambiguity in this example lies in the possibility to interpret the ‗T‘ in the idiomatic expression ‗to a T‘ as ‗tea‘, a light evening meal:
Jerome
Henzl
Novák
Harris, said,
Harris však
Pak ale Harris
however, that the
prohlásil, ţe řeka by dodal, ţe přesto
Ţáček Harris dodal, ţe jemu osobně řeka
river would suit him se mu hodila jako
přese všecko by mu
vyhovuje do posled-
to a ―T‖. I don‘t
„Č“. Co to je „Č―,
řeka seděla. Já sice
ního puntíku.
know what a ―T‖ is
nevím (leda ţe by to nevím, jak by řeka
Nevím sice, co to
(except a six-penny
byl čaj za šest pencí
poslední puntík je,
one, which includes
i s chlebem, máslem by seděla modelem,
ale mám za to, ţe na
bread-and-butter
a pečivem podle
a ani potom mi není
takové shodě musí
and cake ad lib.,
libosti, coţ je za ty
jasné, na čem by
rozhodně něco být.
and is cheap at the
peníze levné, kdyţ
seděla, . . . (20)
Zdá se navíc, ţe
mohla sedět, ledaţe
price, if you haven‘t to má člověk místo
řeka vyhovuje úplně
had any dinner). It
oběda). Zdálo se, ţe
všem, a to jí lze
seems to suit
všichni jsou pro
připsat jedině k
everybody,
řeku, coţ je řece
dobru. (20)
however, which is
jenom ke cti. (19)
greatly to its credit. (16)
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Henzl is probably not aware of the idiom used in this extract and renders the original wordplay literally, which again distorts the wordplay and does not make sense for a Czech reader. Novák employs the Czech idiomatic expression ‗řeka mu seděla‘ and then fittingly recreates the following remark, only leaving out the brackets. Ţáček follows a similar strategy as Novák, choosing idiomatic expression ‗vyhovuje do posledního puntíku‘ and remaking the original utterance in brackets. It was already pointed out that translation of humour activated by pragmatic devices and ambiguity is a demanding work and that it is up to the translator to provide the target language readership with a meaningful text, preserving as many wordplays and ambiguities as possible, especially when a humorous text is in question. When the three Czech translations of Three Men in a Boat are compared, it comes out that Henzl leaves out almost all the instances of ambiguity and in cases in which he retains the ambiguity, he renders it in a way that sounds unnatural in Czech. Novák, on the contrary, is in most cases successful in preserving the invariant of the humorous situation (or wordplay) and transposing it into Czech, only then making necessary adaptations and reorganisations. Finally, Ţáček also manages to preserve the majority of instances of ambiguity by transposing the invariant from the original into the target text, sometimes at the cost of full naturalness and fluency in the Czech version, however.
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6 Conclusion This study was performed in order to define and exemplify the leading humour devices in Jerome Klapka Jerome‘s novel Three Men in a Boat and to present their Czech translations, the translation procedures the Czech translators employed and their final solutions. As the three translators – Vladimír Henzl, J. Z. Novák and Milan Ţáček – opted for very different strategies and distinct approaches to the translation of the novel‘s humour, I will attempt to summarise them in this concluding chapter. Translation of humour based on irony and reversal of situation should not constitute any substantial problems. The only obstacle that could make the translation more difficult is culture-specific irony which, however, is not present in the novel. Moreover, the mechanisms for creating irony in English are the same as in Czech (e.g. overemphasis, contradiction, understatement, pretended innocence etc.), therefore, the translators were not forced to make any considerable changes in the text. All the translators preserved the above stated mechanisms but when it came to formal features, such as the repetition and the forms of sentences which sometimes also contributed to the irony, only Henzl and Novák were successful. Ţáček retained the formal features only partly or neglected them altogether. All in all, the translators maintained the effect of the irony in the novel, the irony ranging only in its intensity: Henzl stuck to the original and did not play with the language very much; Novák enhanced Jerome‘s irony by using more expressive words; and Ţáček enriched the irony in some cases as well, but not to such an extent as Novák did. In chapter three metaphorical language and its contribution to humour was explored. Two types of metaphor – stock metaphors (idioms) and original metaphors – and two categories of metaphor (simile and personification) were chosen to be studied. Metaphorical language was used in the descriptive, nature-depicting as well as 71
humorous parts of Jerome‘s novel. As the metaphors were not culturally based and involved only universally applicable symbols, their translations did not require any substantial changes or recreations. If there were any, they were the results of the translators‘ own initiative, not of the necessity (for example, on the grounds of cultural differences) to recreate them. Peter Newmark suggested five approaches to rendering metaphors in translation, out of which three were employed by the Czech translators. In the overwhelming majority of cases the strategy of translating metaphor using the same image was applied by the translators. There were only two cases of replacing the source language image by a different image with the same sense (both by Ţáček) and one case of translating metaphor by a simile (employed by Novák). As far as the translation of idioms (stock metaphors) is concerned, the translators either made use of Czech idiomatic equivalents or opted for Czech unidiomatic expressions with the same sense, both ways being equally successful. The categories of personification and simile were rendered literally for the most part, with only one exception – the expression ‗hold on like grim death‘ had to be substituted, for literal translation would not make sense to Czech readers. The linguistic device of register was also exploited to establish humour in Jerome‘s Three Men in a Boat. The author employed very formal register in inappropriate situations to exaggerate or to create irony, and informal register, including colloquial language used by the three characters and language of villagers, to characterise and mock the figures. The mechanism of juxtaposition or mixing of different registers could be also found in the novel. As for the translation of register, Vladimír Henzl chose standard, formal Czech for translating all the register types. This approach worked when formal English appeared in the original as well; when the text was written in non-standard, colloquial English, however, applying standard Czech
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spoilt the original author‘s intention to portray and mock the characters and impaired the comic effect. Novák, on the other hand, preserved formal register where necessary and rendered colloquial language by means of colloquial, regionally unmarked Czech. Milan Ţáček maintained highly formal register as well; when translating non-standard, colloquial parts of the text, he opted for standard Czech with occasional colloquial expressions so that a certain level of colloquiality was preserved. Juxtaposition of registers in which the transition from formal to informal register (or vice versa) was important, was retained and accentuated to the highest degree by J. Z. Novák thanks to his frequent usage of colloquial language. In Ţáček‘s translation the transition was apparent only to some extent whereas in Henzl‘s version the juxtaposition could not even be created due the translator‘s employment of only one register. The last chapter discussed pragmatics-based expedients of humour, among them maxims flouting and breaking the cooperative principle which can lead to misunderstanding. Misunderstanding can be also caused by ambiguity, mainly lexical (polysemy) and syntactical as far as Three Men in a Boat is concerned. The phenomenon of wordplay was included in this chapter as well as it was very frequently built on lexical ambiguity. The pragmatics-based devices and wordplay are really effective sources of humour but also very difficult to deal with in translation. The very pragmatic devices, such as the gap between what is intended and what is interpreted or the maxims flouting, are not difficult to tackle; problems arise when the pragmaticsbased humour exploits ambiguity. Translating ambiguity presents a demanding task as the source language linguistic features used ambiguously do not have to correspond to the target language ones and as homonyms of the same semantic content in two languages occur very rarely. Poláčková suggested that it is important for a translator to transpose the information invariant of the ambiguity-based humour and then make
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necessary stylistic and other adaptations. Henzl did not take such an approach – he very frequently left the ambiguity out and when he preserved it, it was at the cost of naturalness of language or comprehensibility. Novák and Ţáček, on the contrary, retained almost all the examples of ambiguity by transposing the information invariant into Czech and making subsequent adjustments, or by substituting the English polysemous words by adequate Czech ones. This thesis serves as an in-depth study of four principal humour devices present in Jerome‘s novel Three Men in a Boat – irony, metaphor, register, and ambiguity and wordplay. It also provides the findings concerning the individual translators‘ procedures, approaches, solutions and tendencies as well as comments on the renderings, though these are mostly subjective and are a matter of personal preferences. This work gives a deeper insight into the selected problems of humour translation and, as very little has been written about the translation of the expedients of humour so far, it could serve as inspiration for further research in this area.
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Bibliography Primary Sources
Jerome, Jerome Klapka. Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog. Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1946. Jerome, Jerome Klapka. Tři muţi ve člunu, o psu nemluvě. Trans. Vladimír Henzl. Praha: Práce, 1957. Jerome, Jerome Klapka. Tři muţi ve člunu: o psu nemluvě. Trans. J. Z. Novák. Praha: Odeon, 1975. Jerome, Jerome Klapka. Tři muţi ve člunu (o psu nemluvě); Tři muţi na toulkách. Trans. Milan Ţáček. Praha: Aurora, 2002.
Secondary Sources
Alvarez, Antonia. ―On Translating Metaphor.‖ Meta 38.3 (1993): 479 – 90. Erudit. 5 March 2010
. Cuddon, J. A. A Dictionary of Literary Terms. London: Penguin Books, 1979. ―Henzl Vladimír.‖ Obec překladatelů. 2008. Obec překladatelů. 5 April 2010 . Koponen, Maarit. ―Wordplay in Donald Duck comics and Their Finnish Translations.‖ Pro Gradu Thesis. U of Helsinki, 2004 . Korhonen, Elina. ―Translation Strategies for Wordplay in The Simpsons.‖ Pro Gradu Thesis. U of Helsinki, 2008 . Levý, Jiří. Umění překladu. Praha: Panorama, 1983. 75
Mateo, Marta. ―The Translation of Irony.‖ Meta 40.1 (1995): 171 – 8. Erudit. 28 Jan. 2010 . McArthur, Tom, ed. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Menacere, Mohammed. ―Arabic Metaphor and Idiom in Translation.‖ Meta 37.3 (1992): 567 – 72. Erudit. 5 March 2010 . Montgomery, Martin et al. Ways of Reading. London: Routledge, 1992. Newmark, Peter. Approaches to Translation. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1988. Newmark, Peter. Paragraphs on Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1993. Nicholas, Jeremy, ed. Idle Thoughts on Jerome K Jerome. Great Barfield: The Jerome K Jerome Society, 2009. ―Novák Jiří Zdeněk.‖ Obec překladatelů. 2008. Obec překladatelů. 5 April 2010 . Poláčková, Milena. ―On Some Problems of Humour in Language (With Regard to Translation from English to Czech).‖ Philologica Pragensia 33 (1990): 80 – 93. Richards, I.A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971. Ross, Alison. The Language of Humour. London: Routledge, 1998. Stříbrný, Zdeněk. Dějiny anglické literatury II. Praha: Academia, 1987. Thomas, Jenny. Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1995. Vlašín, Štěpán. Slovník literární teorie. Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1984. Yule, George. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Zemanová, Markéta. ―The Literary Study of Humour in the Novel Three Men in a Boat‖. MA thesis. Masaryk U, 2000. Ţáček, Milan. Email to the author. 21 April 2010.
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Websites consulted
Bibliografie A. Tichého. 2005. Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky FF MU v Brně. 10 April 2010 . The Huntley and Palmers Collection. 2003. Reading Borough Council. 5 March 2010 .
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Résumé The present diploma thesis concentrates on the humour devices employed in Jerome Klapka Jerome‘s novel Three Men in a Boat and on their Czech translations. The novel was first published in 1889 and became very popular in no time, not only in England but also in the Czech literary milieu. Its popularity has been confirmed by numerous translations, republications and adaptations for films. There are five Czech translations of the novel, the last three – by Vladimír Henzl, J.Z. Novák and Milan Ţáček – being the subject of the study in this work. The work provides background information on Jerome Klapka Jerome, his life and his work, and briefly explains the concept of ‗humour‘. The following chapters are devoted to the research into the principal devices and expedients of humour in the novel – irony, metaphor, register, and ambiguity and wordplay. The leading device of humour contributing to the overall tone of the novel is represented by irony which is predominantly created by overemphasis, pretended innocence and innuendos. Metaphor functions as a mechanism for stimulating images and enables the reader to perceive a situation in new, original ways, thereby reinforcing and even more activating comic situations. To exaggerate and to characterise and mock the figures in the novel, Jerome exploits the device of register, choosing from highly formal, colloquial or rural languages. The phenomenon of ambiguity also forms an essential part of the novel as it is used to establish humour based on misunderstanding and appears in wordplay which participates in creating humour in the novel as well. The main aim of the thesis, however, is to observe and describe the individual translators‘ methods, procedures and tendencies in the translation process concerning the humour devices. The translators pursue very different translation strategies and each of the translations offers excellent as well as less successful renderings. Nevertheless, 78
the work is not meant to judge or criticise the translators‘ solutions, its purpose is rather to point out interesting translation methods and approaches and to provide the basis for further study of humour devices translation.
Resumé Ve své diplomové práci jsem se zaměřila na prostředky humoru pouţité v románu Jeroma Klapky Jeroma Tři muţi ve člunu a na jejich české překlady. Román byl poprvé vydán roku 1889 a okamţitě si získal oblibu jak u anglického, tak českého čtenářstva. Jeho oblibu dokládá i značný počet překladů, znovuvydání a filmových adaptací. Do češtiny byl Jeromův román přeloţen celkem pětkrát; poslední tři překlady – Vladimíra Henzla, J. Z. Nováka a Milana Ţáčka – jsou předmětem studie v této diplomové práci. Práce uvádí základní informace týkající se autorova ţivota a díla a stručně vysvětluje význam pojmu „humor―. Následující kapitoly jsou věnovány výzkumu hlavních prostředků humoru uţitých v románu – ironie, metafor, řečových registrů, dvojsmyslů a slovních her. Ústředním prostředkem humoru, který přispívá k celkovému vyznění románu, je ironie tvořená zejména pomocí přílišného důrazu, předstírané nevědomosti a naráţek. Metafora slouţí jako nástroj, který podněcuje představivost a umoţňuje čtenáři vnímat určitou situaci novým, neotřelým způsobem. Pouţití metafory tak můţe komickou situaci ještě více zvýraznit a oţivit. K nadsázce, k znázornění a zesměšnění postav v románu vyuţívá Jerome řečové registry, ať uţ se jedná o formální, hovorovou nebo vesnickou mluvu. Také dvojsmysly hrají v tomto románu důleţitou roli – objevují se v humoru zaloţeném na nedorozumění a ve slovních hrách, které k humoru neodmyslitelně patří.
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Hlavním cílem této práce je však sledovat a popsat, jaké metody a postupy jednotliví překladatelé při práci s prostředky humoru pouţívají a jak jejich řešení působí. Překladatelé se drţí odlišných překladových strategií a kaţdý překlad nabízí velmi zdařilé, ale i méně povedené výsledky. Diplomová práce se však nesnaţí překlady posuzovat nebo kritizovat, jejím účelem je spíše poukázat na zajímavé metody a přístupy k překladu a poskytnout jakýsi podklad pro další výzkum v oblasti překladu prvků humoru.
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81
